My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

I tried the same tack. I read out the dinner choices as Griff had done. I tried to use her newspaper, too, to talk to her. 'Isn't this dreadful?' I said, about a headline, or 'Do you know who that is?' about a picture of a soap star. I read out a Quick Crossword clue and she tried to answer. Or rather--as in a game of charades--she would communicate that she knew the answer, and then it was down to me to make suggestions, and for her to shake her head and frown, or nod and urge me on, until I guessed it right. If she let me know that she was drawing a blank then it was me who did the mimes and the gurning, until she said 'Oh! Oh!' to let me know she'd got it. There were some words she could say. She said 'yellow' for lemon and 'big doors' for wardrobe. She couldn't manage more than three or four words at a time.

Bridget and her mother Helen--Hen--have a relationship at arms' length. They see each other once a year, on Helen's birthday, going to the same ratty tavern, and though Hen seems to resent that she is not more included in her daughter's life, any attempt at change in a way that might bring them closer leads to more misunderstanding, more resentment. As Bridget's boyfriend John observes--when Hen finally meets him after years and years--Bridget's mother seems to have a preconceived notion about how any interaction ought to go, and the way it actually goes fails to reach her perception. In the meantime, she is desperately lonely, throwing herself into clubs and cruises and activities, searching for a man who will could become her third husband, but without the capacity for change or accommodation that such love would require.

My Phantoms is a book that's so small in conception, so confined to the everyday miseries of mothering and daughtering that you find yourself wondering if, despite the protagonist not sharing a name with author Gwendoline Riley, you're reading some of that autofiction you keep hearing is everywhere these days. But what it does, it does well: Riley captures exactly the feelings of stagnation and standoffishness that characterize only familial relationships. The way in which the need for change is glaringly obvious, but the person in front of you is too familiar for either of you to change--you know each other too well, which is why you don't know each other at all. At times I found it a little too small, feeling that, even though Hen is quite specifically evoked and alive-seeming, the familiarity of the narrative made it an odd subject for a novel.

In the novel's final movement, Hen develops a brain tumor. (This does provide a little melodrama, but then again, that's an ordinary kind of story, too: such medical ends are awaiting all of us.) In her diminished form, unable to speak coherently, Hen is not so different than she always was. What's different is that the possibility of change, of drawing closer or resolving the small barriers of family bitterness, has been precluded. Hen, spoiler alert, dies, but in a way her death is prefigured by the death of these possibilities. In the end, Bridget understands her mother, pities her, but never reaches her.

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

But there is something else. As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. For one brief moment we noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, a memoir of her experience training a falcon in the wake of her father's death, might be my favorite non-fiction book of the past several years. I don't read a lot of non-fiction, and part of its appeal was its literariness: Macdonald interweaves her own story with rich threads of fiction, like that of fellow falconer T. H. White, and history and myth. But it also resonated with me because, like several people have in the wake of the COVID-10 pandemic, I have become more interested in birding and birds. Though training a hawk and birdwatching are very different pursuits, they share an inexplicable sense of satisfaction that derives from the way human and animal life intersects.

One of my favorite essays from Macdonald's new collection Vesper Flights hits much closer to home: Macdonald describes watching fall migrants in New York City from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, whose bright lights both attract and confuse the birds. In her account they "resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire" and "ghostly points of light." In this moment Macdonald captures a very specific sense of amazement that occurs when one realizes that New York City, the concrete jungle, is--and has always been--a place where birds have lived lives that precede and overwrite us. Birding in New York puts me in touch with the transitory nature of life, as if the earth wears the city lightly.

The experience of reading Vesper Flights can't compare to H is for Hawk. The strength of that memoir is not just in the incision of its insight but the power of its narrative: the tortuous twin processes of training the hawk and coming to terms with the death of a father. The essays in Vesper Flights can feel too brief and too numerous, and when there are so many the form begins to show. The epiphanies come, as they never do in life, with a little too much regularity. The strongest essays are often the ones that linger the longest, like a long profile of a researcher who uses Chile's Atacama Desert as a stand-in for the surface of Mars, or an account of the yearly ritual of "swan upping," in which the Queen's swans--she owns most of the swans in the country, I guess--are tracked and tagged.

A theme does eventually emerge: several of the essays address the way that our ideas of the natural world intersect with the burgeoning forces of nationalism. In more than one piece, Macdonald describes how, during World War II, species that were considered notably "British" became rallying cries for preservation, as if British identity were to hinge on the continued existence of these birds. She makes much of the fact that birds don't know borders, even as they are enlisted in our most parochial disputes about who belongs where. She talks about how immense murmurations of starlings helped develop wartime radar technology, and hapless migrators whose leg tags have been mistaken for spy technology by suspicious powers. This is such an interesting perspective that I found myself longing for a book that might have been--not a collection of brief essays, but a book that develops this theme as fully and insightfully as H is for Hawk.