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His for Hawk covers a lot of territory. Helen Macdonald has won many well-deserved and prestigious prizes for her lyrical memoir about training a hawk and how it helped her through the complicated mourning of her father's death. It is a literate book whose true subject is the relationship between psychic reality and the external world. An important figure in her story is her childhood hero, the author T. H. White, who also wrote about raising a hawk. Macdonald refers to ideas developed by psychoanalytic writers including Freud, Winnicott, and Loewald, bringing theory to life for a general readership.
As a memoir, it is incomplete. She explores her close tie to her father in great detail, yet tells almost nothing about the quality of her relationships with her surviving mother and brother. We don't know much about how she is situated in her life, to what extent she is inhibited in using her talents, why she doesn't have a job or a romantic partner. She is eloquent about the violence of her grief, but is quiet about her own dynamics, and we are left to wonder how much she is communicating about herself when she tells us about the shame that compromised the life of T. H. White. Altogether these are minor omissions in a profoundly moving book that addresses what it means to be human and live in the natural world. Ultimately the work is a philosophical meditation about finding one's place in the world, as an individual and in a community, closer in genre to Walden than to Wild. Although rooted in her particular life story, by following the web of her associations Macdonald explores ideas about sadomasochism in relationships, the use of fantasy to make reality tolerable, and the potential for survival of a coherent self in the face of trauma and loss.