George: A Magpie Memoir

I’ll confess I wanted to review this memoir, in part, because of a prying curiosity. What might the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes reveal to me about her parents, that I don’t already know? Frieda Hughes, a painter and poet, is regularly introduced in relation to these two literary superstars, whose passionate, brief marriage and its volatile aftermath has threatened to consume how we talk about their legacies. But I’m curious about Frieda too. What is it like to live in a world where every detail of your mother’s death and your parents’ marriage is picked over and plundered? Would it feel like there’s nothing left of them for you?

While Sylvia and Ted are briefly mentioned here, they appear mostly as ghosts. Written in diary form, this unique memoir is a character study of a magpie chick Hughes discovered in the garden of her home in Wales after a spring storm. Determined to save the orphaned corvid from likely death, she devotes significant energy to his care, to the detriment of her marriage to the man she refers to as ‘The Ex’. Playful George brings her joy, despite constantly pooing in her kitchen. His care provides her with a tangible purpose – the simultaneous consolation of nature and nurture.

But of course, as Hughes herself realises, this is all about more than a bird. When George becomes too big to stay indoors, Hughes organises the construction of an outdoor aviary. George flies away before it’s complete. Hughes is reminded of those ghosts – mother, father, husbands, and also her brother Nicholas, who took his own life in 2009. Deep sorrow emerges, delicately, in the expression of grief that connects George, and the rescue birds that follow him, to everyone else Hughes has ever loved and lost before.

Hughes’s memoir impresses with its unpretentious, tactile and intimate voice. As Max Porter suggested, in a novel that was deeply influenced by Ted Hughes’s Crow, grief is the thing with feathers and art the definitive act of remembrance.