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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...

AT NIGHT, THE WIFE MAKES HER POINT   No I don’t have Cindy Crawford’s legs I haven’t spent my life walking down runways in fashion shows, dazzled under the glaring lights of photographers My legs broaden as they reach the hip and in spite of my multiple efforts to don aerobic gear, work out and sweat, I  can’t control their tendency to widen like pillars ready to support a roof   No I don’t have Cindy Crawford’s waist nor her perfectly smooth and slightly concave tummy with the flawless navel at the center I might have had it once Once I  was even proud of that part of my anatomy That was before my son´s birth, before he decided to be born in haste and come into the world feet first, before the C-section and the scar   No I don’t have Cindy Crawford’s arms tanned, sculpted, each muscle shaped by the right exercise, the precisely balanced weights My slim arms have no more muscles than what are needed to type these characters, carry my children, brush my hair, gesticulate when I envision the future, or embrace my friends   No I don’t have Cindy Crawford’s breasts ample, round, C or B cup Mine are not so appealing in low cut dresses in spite of my mother’s assurance -a mother’s words- that breasts like mine, with no cleavage, had the classical beauty of Milo’s Venus     Ah! And the face How would I dare say I have a face like Cindy Crawford’s! The beauty mark just at the corner of the mouth Such impeccable features: the big eyes, the arched eyebrows, the delicate nose Out of habit, I’ve come to like my face: the elephant’s eyes, the nose with its flaring nostrils, the full lips, sensuous nevertheless All is spared with the help of the mane In this department, I can even beat Cindy Crawford I wonder if this affords you any consolation   Last, but not least, -and this is the weightiest piece of evidence- I don’t have Cindy Crawford’s behind: small, round, each half exquisitely outlined Mine is stubbornly ample, big, amphora or clay vase, take your pick, there is no way to hide it, all I can do is not to be shy about it use it to my advantage to sit comfortably and read, or be a writer   But tell me, how often have you had Cindy Crawford at your feet? How often has she given you

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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Art

May 2013

Techno-primitivism

Vanessa Hodgkinson

David Trotter

Art

May 2013

What follows could have been an essay or an interview. In the event, it resembles the one as little...

Prize Entry

April 2017

A JOURNEY THROUGH ☆ FAMOUS ☆ BY ♫ 'KANYE WEST' ♫

Liam Cagney

Prize Entry

April 2017

A twilit bedroom. Silence. Ceiling view of the base of a hyper-extended bed—the length of a catwalk. Slow pan...

fiction

November 2013

Surviving Sundays

Eduardo Halfon

TR. Sophie Hughes

fiction

November 2013

It was raining in Harlem. I was standing on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 162nd Street, my coat...

 

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