Finches, Ghosts, and Writing about our Mothers

At the close of his review of Nothing but Ghosts, Ed Goldberg P.S.ed: And what/who is that finch that keeps pecking at Katie’s bedroom window? I have my ideas!

The finch of which Mr. Goldberg speaks is ever present, introduced in the book's second sentence:

There are the things that have been and the things that haven't happened yet. There is the squiggle of a line between, which is the color of caution, the color of the bird that comes to my window every morning, rattling me awake with the hammer of its beak. You would think that the glass would break, or else that dumb bird's beak. You would think that I could think myself right on back to sleep, because I am sixteen, a grown up, and I know things. But this is the start of every day: being rattled awake by the world’s most annoying bird.

In Ghosts, Katie is searching for answers in the wake of her mother's dying. Ultimately the world's most annoying bird shows her the way. In real life, the finch arrived shortly after my mother's death—pounded at my office window until I finally began to pay it some attention. There hadn't been finches in these parts before. Certainly I'd never had a bird drill at my window; have you? But my mother was gone, and there was this bird, and suddenly it occurred to me that spirits return in gilded feathers. I hung a feeder by the window, and more finches arrived. I wrote Nothing but Ghosts in a fevered spring and summer, accompanied by the birds.

Today, in the New York Times, Lori Gottlieb writes an important essay about the choices writers make when they are writing about their mothers. The reverberations, the ramifications, the rights, or not, of a writer. With Ghosts I chose to honor my mother by not writing about my mother. I wrote, instead, about the overwhelm of loss, about love in the aftermath of dying. I wrote toward the spirit of my mother without using a single scene from her real life. I wrote fiction, in other words, and left it there, for fiction, I've discovered, after many books and many genres, often takes us closest to the uncompromised, unreprimanded truth.

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In Hovering Flight

Ever since the goldfinches began appearing outside my window (my mother's spirit, I've thought, I think), I've been paying closer attention to their effervescence—the way their feathers go green, then gray in autumn; the way they'll sit on the spokes of their feeder, calm, while the bright male cardinal, the blue jay, the squirrel look with envy from the tree.

In Hovering Flight, Joyce Hinnefeld's glorious first novel, is, therefore, the perfect book for me this weekend. Perfect because it is about birds, ecology, mothers and daughters. Perfect because so much of it takes place not far from my own part of the world, in Bucks County. Perfect because if it is masterfully wrought—quiet yet momentous, cohering, heartfull, whole. Hinnefeld is a gifted, informed, intelligent writer—careful, tender, never excessive—and in unraveling this story about a bird-loving professor and the student who becomes his wife, this story about their daughter, this story about eco-activism and a decision to die, Hinnefeld yields what feels to be a true, uncompromised story in language clear as bird call.

Listen, for example, to these few lines from Flight's beginning. It would have been easy to muck this up with too many words, too many adjectives, some compound metaphor. Hinnefeld restrains herself, avoids complication, and yields the tang of beauty:

"What she wanted was not only to draw birds but to understand them, to come as close as she could to feeling what it was like to fly with hollow bones. To sit atop a warm and throbbing egg within a delicate bed that rests in the crook of a branch. To sing not from something like a human throat but from a place deep within the breast."

I'd had plans for months to buy this book. Ron Charles' review in last Sunday's Washington Post made me feel as if I could wait no longer:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603318.html

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