Writing about Life

I’ve just finished a great ‘memoir’ style book that reminds me that you don’t have to think of memoir as starting at the beginning and sketching in one’s whole life … H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald is about a young woman who trains a goshawk, and concerns only one section of her life, but it’s wide open in terms of ideas. She is grieving the sudden death of her father, and weaves this into her journey with the hawk, so it’s not just a nature story, and it’s more than a grief memoir. I would highly recommend anybody who is interested in writing about their own life to read it, and see how Macdonald has used language and anecdote to tell her story.