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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.

Articles Available Online


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...

Marine Le Pen gets into town tonight That’s what I heard Did you hear, Marine Le Pen’s in D the 29th My reaction on hearing this was the reaction of a coma victim, but in the hours that ensued the fact had risen, put it that way, to my head (having already possessed a thigh, the both, an arm, the nape of the neck, little stiffer, the whole neck, the teeth and the jaw, nose by the nostrils because that’s another air you’re breathing now, temples, forehead, my ears, Marine Le Pen is on the ceiling, there she is, making herself at home having fixed up a little room with a bed for one, slipper chair, nightstand on which a Life of Georges Pompidou is resting, she’s switched out the overhead as it was slightly dated with its tulip bulb, she’s put up pink neon in the shape of a toucan and is enjoying a Twix bar while making an inspection of her lacquered toenails)    I don’t know her personally Let’s say that I don’t know her yet, because in a little while, in seven hours, I fully plan on heading up the avenue to see her; she’s supposed to be doing what it is she does on General De Gaulle Square, and so will we be doing our thing, in consequence, on General De Gaulle Square Whatever our intentions may be as we head up the avenue, we’ll all be there, we’ll be at least passing through General De Gaulle Square, whether preoccupied, nonchalant (hey, MLP in D) or focused and concentrated (that MLP is in D), and what I’m wondering is where she’ll touch down In front of the regional paper’s local branch? Because what we could do then would be throw open that glazed door, and the blow would be dealt to her back; or we could watch her out the window, pressing our foreheads against it, squishing our hands to make visors out of them and breathing out a grey cloud, the office being unheated (the temperature being three degrees Celsius) But she’s going to

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


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Interview

February 2016

Interview with Gerard Byrne

Izabella Scott

Interview

February 2016

I first encountered Gerard Byrne’s eerily dislocated films at Tate Britain, where 1984 and Beyond (2005–7) was shown on...

Interview

May 2011

Interview with Alison Klayman

Shepherd Laughlin

Interview

May 2011

Until his arrest in Beijing on 3 April as he boarded a plane to Hong Kong, Ai Weiwei was...

Interview

November 2014

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

J. S. Tennant

Interview

November 2014

Juan Goytisolo is one of Spain’s leading writers, but one with a fraught relationship with his home country, to put it...

 

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