REVIEW: Son of a Bird by Nin Andrews

Reviewed by Sarah Evans

Not all of us still see our childhood homes on a regular basis, and many of us never see them at all except in memory. Some memories we cling to like safety blankets, and others we wish we could bury under the world’s tallest trash heap.

Sometimes these memories are little more than a tangible object. I’ll never forget the carpet that stretched across our kitchen floor, its 1970s-era floral pattern soaking up every liquid we dropped onto it. My alcoholic father once knocked a container of pickled beets onto it and screamed at my mother, blaming her as she knelt to sponge up the dark red juice.

How quickly a memory of a simple object can carry us into something much deeper.

In her memoir, Son of a Bird (Etruscan Press; April 2025), Nin Andrews writes, “‘The past is gone and you can’t get it back,’ my father always said. But I want to tell him, you can still visit.”

In her book, Andrews makes a prolonged visit to the Virginia farmhouse of her childhood, where she grew up with her mother, father, and multiple siblings. She shares her story through prose poems, the perfect choice for weaving together a series of memories that often linger around one simple object or moment in time. Each chapter makes a captivating micro-story on its own, but together, they become the haunting backbone of a life the author is still trying to piece together and understand as an adult.

“Son of a bird” was what Andrews’s Black nanny called her when she’d been naughty. Even as she paints loving portraits of her nanny through poetry, the white-skinned Andrews wonders whether her portrayal of Miss Mary is racist. “Don’t mention your Black nanny,” her father used to tell her, “or people will think you’re a spoiled brat, a modern-day Scarlett O’Hara.”

Andrews’s parents often scolded her about revealing too much of herself to others. They held tight to their own secrets — her father, a closeted gay man; her mother, an undiagnosed autistic woman. Andrews’s parents took the idea of privacy to dangerous levels. She remembers her mother hissing, “don’t tell anyone else” after Andrews talked of seeing Death continually crouching in the corner of her room. When Andrews struggled with her own mental health conditions and suicidal ideations, her parents told her she didn’t need professional help and even barred her from getting it — not wanting others in town to know their business.

Andrews’s gift for writing poetry makes each of her memories, no matter how large or small, light up the page. The childhood Andrews in the opening poem pictures her older self “as an old woman looking back or down, like an owl swooping over the fields of the past, memories like scared mice scampering through the grass.” On the night as a child when Death visited her dreams so vividly that she thought she had died, Andrews “walked to the window and saw the full moon flooding the fields and hills as if everything were dressed in a bridal veil.” Each line reaches out and tugs at the soul, threatening to grasp the threads of forgotten memories from your own childhood.

The one problem with Son of a Bird, as with many good stories that you never want to end, is that it’s too short. Andrews invites readers into her childhood home and reveals the intimate stories that ultimately send her into a mental-health spiral as a teenager and young adult. But then, after 133 pages, she closes the door again just as she’s starting to get comfortable with the reader spending time inside.

Andrews has explored her story in multiple formats and books before this one — a good sign that she’s likely not done telling this story, either. Until the next chapter, readers thankfully have an album full of vivid snapshots of Andrews’s childhood home, one that she — and readers — will never forget.