Charlie Gilmour’s partner Yana was the one to bring home the magpie chick, which had fallen to the ground in a scrappy part of southeast London. Yana’s sister had found it and taken it to her studio, which is located in what Gilmour calls a leaky industrial unit on the edge of an English junkyard. 

 “This part of the city seems to be full of secrets and surprises,” he writes, “but they’re rarely cute and fluffy. A police raid on a neighboring warehouse uncovers a cannabis farm one week; stolen motorcycles the next; a friend opens up a long-abandoned shipping container and finds it crammed full of Jet Skis; someone I once shared a prison cell with boasted of having dumped someone’s sawn-off limbs nearby. This is the last place on earth I would have expected something as yolky soft and bird-bone brittle as a chick to turn up.”

Hooked yet? What got you? “someone I once shared a prison cell with” or the “yolky-soft” chick?” Maybe the juxtaposition of the two, which opens the story of Charlie and Yana raising a magpie that seemingly fell from the sky, neither nest nor parents in sight.

I first read about Charlie Gilmour’s memoir, Featherhood, in a notably bad-tempered review. The reviewer asked why books allegedly about animals and birds are so often about the authors. And, he added grumpily, their parents. Why not just write about the bloody birds?

I felt immediately defensive on Gilmour’s behalf, even though I’d never heard of him. I wanted to remind the reviewer that he could find plenty of textbooks about birds in the biology section of his local library. He might also have taken a hint from Gilmour’s sub-title: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie. Then there’s the fact that one of the most-loved books of the past decade is Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which is not only about training a goshawk, but also the death of Macdonald’s father. Memoirs involving animals are usually about peoples’ relationships with their families, or their lack of relationships, and about trying to heal the pain. 

So I bought Charlie Gilmour’s book, not because I was researching anything, but out of fellow feeling. Opening it, I found that Gilmour had a lot of pain to grapple with. Also that he was blessed with extraordinary advantages. Gilmour is still in his early 30s, but he’s already lived a life of extremes, around which his memoir treads with admirable delicacy.

For a start, one of the fathers of the sub-title is David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Charlie was six years old when David Gilmour married his mother, the British novelist Polly Samson. David had helped raise Charlie for three years before their marriage, and now he legally adopted him. The pain Charlie writes about is not economic. Nor was he neglected. Cliches about self-involved rock stars fall by the wayside as he writes.

“David was solid, dependable,” Charlie says, “cooking dippy eggs and soldiers for breakfast, driving me to nursery school in his car, taking me on trips to the zoo, letting me bounce on his round belly, gripping me by an arm and a leg and swinging me in circles through the air, the feeling of flying and, at the same time, being securely held.”

David Gilmour went through a messy divorce before marrying Polly Samson, and had four children from his previous marriage. 

“One day,” Charlie writes, “David discovered that my older siblings couldn’t tell the difference between a cabbage and a lettuce, so we began to spend weekends in the countryside, and then moved there permanently, to the farm in Sussex where my parents still live. More children followed: my two little brothers and my little sister, a small herd let loose on the farm. It was a dream childhood: full of care and affection; campfires and dogs. We landed on our feet. I should be thankful, and I am.

“Yet,” he writes.

Yet Charlie couldn’t let go of his birth father, or at least the idea of his birth father: the poet Heathcote Williams, who had abandoned him and his mother without explanation when Charlie was a baby. Feeling an undefinable lack that grows into an obsession, Charlie spends years trying to reconnect with the eccentric Heathcote—and “eccentric” is putting it mildly. Charlie sends him letters and emails, but his father keeps forgetting to reply, or pretending to forget, or simply deciding not to, and it’s hard for Charlie to work out what degree of neglect is in play. 

When he starts showing up at his father’s house, he also has to brave the hostility of Heathcote’s wife, to whom Williams was married during his live-in relationship with Polly Samson, and with whom he had two daughters. He’d told Polly they were long separated when he began living with her, but they weren’t. Half-ruined castles feature in the rococo Heathcote narrative. Titled friends. Fairy-tale cottages. That and the fact that Heathcote, a magician and fire-eater, once inadvertently set himself on fire on the doorstep of another girlfriend he was trying to charm.

The memoir could easily have descended into name-dropping, and who likes a nepo baby? Gilmour also has to deal with the fact that some of these once-famous names are receding into the past. Maybe Heathcote Williams remains well-known in England, but I can barely remember his work being discussed by writers a generation older than me. And while David Gilmour is still performing, many of Pink Floyd’s fans are a few years my senior, and I couldn’t tell you much about his music. Most people my son’s age probably wouldn’t get it if Charlie bashed too hard on his fathers’ fame. I know a couple of folks with once-famous parents who can’t seem to stop dropping their names, and the answering looks are increasingly blank. It’s getting sad.

Yet I’ve mentioned Gilmour’s delicacy as a narrator. He actually un-name-drops, if I can put it that way, managing not to alienate any part of his audience. When writing about the time Heathcote Williams set himself on fire, he doesn’t say the girlfriend his father had hoped to impress was super-model Jean Shrimpton. I only learned her name when I googled Williams, and it called up memories of seeing her picture on magazine covers when I was a kid. 

Gilmour’s writing style is just as circumspect. I have the sense that he wrote and deleted, rewrote and deleted, wrestling with each word, trying to decide how hard to lean into the extremity of his story. Sometimes his care makes his prose feel over-worked. Do we really need that line about the magpie chick being “yolky soft and bird-bone brittle?”

Yet the treading-on-eggshells tone also makes emotional sense as he recounts Heathcote Williams’s repeated rebuffs, the pain it causes him, the drugs he begins to take and his explosion into mania. By the time he’s 20, Charlie Gilmour is a damaged young man—and this before he has a spectacular breakdown and ends up in prison. 

“On the day of my birthday,” he writes, “I’ve already been awake for two days, and I turn up hours late to the restaurant. My mum is shocked to see the state I’m in. I haven’t been home much since summer and the change is stark. My relationship with drugs—already intimate—has become deeply-committed: something close to self-harm. Self-abuse. My skin has turned a sickly shade of yellow. There are enormous bags under my eyes. I’ve lost weight. The words coming out of my mouth make very little sense. I spend much of the dinner hiding underneath the table. It’s bad, but it’s only a dress rehearsal for what’s to come.”

Not long afterwards, Charlie joins a student protest over loan fees. It’s 2011, and he’s in his second year at Cambridge University. High on LSD, pills and brandy, he gets tangled up in a royal convoy on his way to the protest, bending down to wave at then-Prince Charles through the window of his Jaguar (he remembers the prince waving back) before jumping on the hood of a security vehicle, convinced that he’s king. He eventually joins the protest by climbing the Cenotaph war memorial, swinging back and forth on a thick Union Jack flag, his long hair flying—a gift to photographers that makes the front page of the next day’s papers. 

When his identity as David Gilmour’s son is revealed, the public sends the family hate mail protesting Charlie’s desecration of a war memorial. They receive gift-wrapped dog turds, and sincere wishes that they all die of cancer. Aware that he needs to clean up, Charlie decides the best way to do this is to write Heathcote Williams a letter.

“I stuck a needle in a vein and filled a syringe with blood. Before it congealed, I used some of it to write a very short letter, which I mailed to Heathcote along with the almost full syringe. The red letters smeared across the page spelled out a simple message: ‘Have your blood back.’”

No one was injured in the student protest, but Charlie was charged with “violent disorder,” convicted and sentenced to 16 months in prison, an absurd sentence that was probably handed down because of his stepfather’s fame. He got off drugs before going inside, but it’s hard not to wince when reaching this part of the story. In his photos, Charlie looks delicate, gentle, sweetly vulnerable. And—prison. He only served four months, but his brief narration of his time inside makes it clear he was brutalized. 

Which brings me to the magpie. Despite the bad-tempered reviewer’s complaint, the rescued magpie is an integral part of the memoir, and of Charlie’s slow recovery from his traumas. He and Yana name it Benzene for the sheen of its feathers, which reminds them of the dark glimmer of oil on water. After bringing the chick home, the practical-minded Yana researches its wormy diet and finds a supply of grubs.

 “Yana passes me a grub from the plastic box in her tool bag. ‘Your turn,’ she says as the grub pulsates across the surface of my palm, yellow and faintly hairy, like a severed toe spasming away. I use the pliers to crush its head and then play mother. Reliable as a clockwork cuckoo, the bird opens wide. Its fragility terrifies me…

“’You really have to shove it in,’ says Yana, stabbing at the air with her index finger.

“I abandon the pliers. I can’t bear to use such a hard metal implement in something so soft and delicate. I push the grub toward the rim of the bird’s black throat with the tip of my finger instead. The bird’s squealing intensifies, and then morphs into a sort of gremlin-like yum yum as peristalsis kicks in and the worm is taken down below. The bird doesn’t stop there. I feel the strong, circular muscles of its esophagus convulse against the end of m finger as it tries to swallow me too. I swiftly withdraw my hand. The bird chirps, tucks its head beside its wing, and falls back to sleep.

“’What now?’” I say.

“’Get more worms,’ Yana says. ‘I think we’ll have to feed it every twenty minutes and we’re already running out.”

Every second chapter, the narrative follows Charlie and Yana as they successfully raise the demanding, intelligent and curious Benzene to an adult. A female, as it turns out, and one that demands full run of their house, croaking out her vocabulary. “Come on,” she cries. “Come on.” The ill-tempered reviewer seems to have missed the fact that Benzene’s story is a detailed examination of how to raise a member of the corvid family. It’s also a consideration of whether one ought to, since it leaves the magpie too dependent on humans, and dangerously trusting.

Meanwhile, the alternating chapters about Charlie’s complicated family story don’t simply run in parallel. Not long after he and Yana adopt the bird, Charlie’s mother tells him casually that Heathcote Williams once raised a jackdaw, another member of the corvid family, and wrote a book about it. This sends Charlie searching for his father’s book, and fuels an even more concerted effort to connect. He hopes their shared experience of raising birds might finally make Heathcote open up, telling Charlie why he left, whether it was Charlie’s fault—Heathcote hadn’t wanted another child—and perhaps what Charlie means to him, regardless.

When Heathcote falls dangerously ill, Charlie’s questions gain greater urgency. At the same time, he and Yana make plans to free Benzene into the wild, wanting her to live among other magpies, yet agonizing about whether she’s too tame to be safe. And Yana gives Charlie an ultimatum. She wants them to have a child, and she’ll give him a year, and one year only, to agree. Will he? 

All these challenges are fraught, and they left me thinking about unanswerable questions. “Mummy,” my son asked me once. “Why are we born?” 

Charlie Gilmour has written a lovely book, and one that grapples elegantly with the issues of parenthood and responsibility. What do we owe? What are we owed? We’re seldom able to give everything and never get it, no matter how hard people try. Yet there are pictures out there now of Charlie holding his daughter, Olga, and looking happy. And he’s reportedly writing another book.

Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie by Charlie Gilmour is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the U.K., Scribners in the U.S. and Simon & Schuster in Canada. You can get it here.