In Featherhood, Charlie Gilmour's relationship with an unintentionally domesticated magpie becomes the lens through which he examines his relationships with his biological father and his stepfather--and his own impending role as a father himself.
Gilmour's biological father, Heathcote Williams, was an eccentric "squatter, writer, actor, alcoholic, poet, anarchist, magician, revolutionary, and Old Etonian." Add to that list serial abandoner of families, and one starts to get a sense of the stranger-than-fiction absentee father figure Gilmour spent his first 27 years chasing, and, he recalls with regret, imitating: "I carried on paying tribute to Heathcote: stealing and pyromania and pranks."
When Gilmour's fiancée rescues an injured magpie, that tribute continues in the most unlikely of ways: Heathcote once domesticated and lived with an injured jackdaw (also a member of the corvid family of birds), and now Gilmour finds himself the adopted father of a magpie, a bird that long overstays its convalescence and becomes a permanent, "chaotic, inquisitive, destructive" force in Gilmour's life.
The (unintentional, but not unwelcome) adoption of the bird parallels Heathcote's somewhat rapid decline into ill health, prompting Gilmour to consider the roles of both of his biological and stepfather in his life to date--and whether he is ready to claim the title of father as his own: What makes a father? What does it mean to care, and why does it matter? Gilmour writes with candor about his failings--as a son, as a spouse, as a potential father--and in so doing, proves the importance of vulnerability and honesty in parenthood in this moving memoir of three fathers (and a magpie). --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm