interview | charlie gilmour

speaking by phone from West Sussex, England. energy and messianic purpose,” he was part of widespread student protests time on house arrest. “People are often punished when actually what they

One bright spot during his sentence was a box of books he received from Elton John and his husband, David Furnish. “I’d never met either of them in my life,” Gilmour says, but he devoured their gift, which featured prison classics including War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. The gift of books “was a very generous and kind gesture,” he says. “I think it’s one of the few things you can do for someone in prison. . . . It gives them the opportunity to at least very briefly escape from where they are.”

While imprisoned, Gilmour kept a daily journal, and he continued writing after his release. Several years later, when Benzene became part of his life, the bird’s presence intensified his need to know—and understand—his biological father. He learned that Heathcote had also rescued a young bird not long before Gilmour’s birth, a jackdaw that he kept as a pet.

In a mysterious moment that seems straight out of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Gilmour says that when he was in the midst of writing the scene about Heathcote’s death for his book, he heard “a cacophony of screams from all the crows and jackdaws and rooks around me.” He recalls, “I ran towards the noise, and there was this angry cloud of corvids over

“Whenever I see a magpie flying overhead, in the back of my From feathers to fatherhood mind, I think it’s going to come and land on my shoulder,” says Charlie Gilmour, An abandoned baby bird helps a talented new writer come to terms with his past

Such thoughts are hardly surprising, given that Gilmour and his part- over a jackdaw. I ran towards them and snatched the jackdaw off the red ner once nursed an abandoned chick and raised her to adulthood. The kites, and the jackdaw just died right there in my hands. It felt like this magpie, whom they named Benzene, took over and transformed Gilmour’s incredibly eerie coincidence considering I had just, in writing, killed my life, helping him come to terms with the fact that when he was 6 months biological father.” old, his biological father, Heathcote Williams, suddenly and inexplicably Featherhood also explores Gilmour’s own journey into fatherhood. “I abandoned Gilmour and his mother. love being father to this child,” he says of Olga, now 2. “It’s a joy. And it also

Heathcote, who died in 2017, was a poet, actor and political activist, as makes me very sad that this joy was something that Heathcote couldn’t well as an amateur magician with a knack for disappearing. Although Gilm- allow himself to experience.” One of Heathcote’s favorite quotations was our met him a handful of times, he never really got to know him. Gilmour Cyril Connolly’s adage, “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than describes his stellar debut, Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a the pram in the hall,” but Gilmour has found the opposite to be true. SomeMagpie, as “the conversation we never had.” Writing about his father came how he became a more efficient writer after Olga’s birth, often attending somewhat naturally, Gilmour says, because “in one sense, he has always to her needs at 4 a.m. and then writing for two or three hours. “It also feels been a character in my imagination.” like a bit of an f-you,” Gilmour admits. “I was going to prove him wrong by

Though he just turned 31, Gilmour sounds infinitely wiser than his years. writing this book while the pram was very much in the hallway.” He, his wife and their child, Olga, have been weathering the pandemic with As it turns out, nurturing Benzene was excellent preparation for Gilmour’s mother, writer and lyricist Polly Samson, and his adoptive father, fatherhood. “She taught me a lot about what it means to love and care David Gilmour, the renowned musician of Pink Floyd fame. Commenting for another creature,” Gilmour says. on his creative, colorful family, Gilmour admits, “I was very, very fortunate And of course, both birds and toddlers to have quite a cast of characters to play around with—quite a few larger- can be distracted by shiny objects. than-life people.” As much as Gilmour treasures the

By far the star of the memoir, however, is Benzene, who had free rein of time he spent with Benzene, he doesn’t Gilmour’s London home, stealing trinkets left and right while leaving drop- endorse keeping wild birds as pets. pings everywhere, often in Gilmour’s long, dark, curly hair. One time the “After four years of it, I can safely say brazen bird even plucked a contact lens right out of the eye of their visiting that the best place for birds is in the friend, a photographer. “Benzene had this weird knack of being able to know trees—not sleeping above your bed, what people value, and then she would go for it,” Gilmour muses. Despite defecating on you as you yourself such antics, he never considered caging the magpie. “She wouldn’t have sleep. . . . I loved her, but I wouldn’t stood for it in any case,” he says. “She would’ve shouted the house down.” recommend the experience to anyone

Gilmour began honing his writing skills while he himself was caged— else.” in prison. In 2011, during a state he describes as “possessed of maniacal —Alice Cary in London against raises in tuition. The 21-year-old was later arrested for Featherhood violent disorder and sent to prison for four months, followed by additional Scribner, $27, 9781501198502 the field, and underneath them, red kites [birds of prey] were standing need is some form of treatment,” he says. Memoir