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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

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Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

‘Ich bin einer,’ I say when my turn comes I am one   I’ve been here before, outside this colossal power station in Friedrichshain, just over the Spree in the old East, very near to where the Berlin Wall once stood On previous occasions I queued with friends, the first time for three hours on a balmy Saturday night, which also happened to be the club’s birthday party I got in just as the sun was coming up The second time for forty minutes in midwinter, the temperature a bone-throbbing -11 Today I’m acting like a Berliner and doing it solo on an indifferent Sunday in April   I’m not here to take drugs, or get drunk, I’m not really looking to hook up; in fact, once I get in, if you dance too close to me I’ll probably move I’m here as a 45-year-old woman, to be on my own, surrounded by techno music played on one of the best sound systems in the world, the harder and louder the better   The building towers over us, monolithic concrete and steel, graffiti covering the bottom floors It’s getting on for 3 p m and there’s about a half-hour queue leading up to the entrance Most of them are male: one mixed group of hopeful tourists who get refused; two thickly bearded men who have obviously spent last night hooking up with each other They have the kinetics of recent sex in the way they touch each other and shimmy to the muffled beat, which gets louder as we approach the door In the final few metres nobody speaks We’re within range of the bouncers now and according to the websites that give advice on how to get in, drawing attention to yourself by being too loud will

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

poetry

January 2012

Tynemouth Lodge

W. N. Herbert

poetry

January 2012

‘Sometimes I go to the tavern and get drunk.          What of it?’                                 Nesimi 1 Bars tend us...

feature

October 2013

A World of Sharp Edges: A Week Among Poets in the Western Cape

André Naffis-Sahely

feature

October 2013

In Antal Szerb’s The Incurable, the eccentric millionaire Peter Rarely steps into the dining car of a train steaming...

feature

September 2014

Paris at Night

Matthew Beaumont

feature

September 2014

The picturesque lightshow that, once the sun has set, takes place on the hour, every hour, when the Eiffel...

 

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