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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...

Day 1 in the Season before Chaos   These were the days before the glitch The weather was acutely neurotic, four seasons compressed into one week, then a week of endless rain, then another four seasons compressed into the following week, then the sweltering days that promised summer in November and the carpet of snow that covered the early daffodils The future bionic woman didn’t have a chip incrusted on her cranium yet She had no idea chance was about to randomise her existence She had no idea what the future had in store for her She didn’t know she was going to become a cyborg She didn’t know a quantum leap was about to snatch her up She knew nothing There were no signs foretelling a prolonged holiday from her usual self, just the habitual vicissitudes of climate change and the average sweet and sour twang of global city life   She had made a few adjustments to her life, though   She was ready to start a new phase   On the 28th November 02, she had highlighted the word ‘orgasmic’ from a book about dreams It wasn’t a word she necessarily related to sex or to the feel the advertising industry attaches to the surface of its products It was a word she associated with discovering ecstatic pleasure in unsuspected things, jouissance She had printed the word in Adventure Subtitles N Bold lower-case size font 16, cut out the A4 paper into a third and placed the big note on the wall above her PC:     orgasmic     She wanted to tune into the orgasmic side of life Choose her own parameters Dodge life’s drudgery or at least minimize its impact It would require constant effort and vigilance, it was a juggling act that wouldn’t always be easy Daily mortifications were always around the corner But she now had a new project She had decided to seek out beauty in everyday life In a way, she thought about it as modern life’s heroism, or should we say ‘postmodern’ life’s heroism Deleting urban jungle fallout in one stroke, postponing it, isolating it, absconding from the A to Z   Not

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

fiction

September 2011

Celesteville's Burning

Andrew Gallix

fiction

September 2011

            Zut, zut, zut, zut.             – Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps...

Art

July 2012

Interview with Ben Rivers

Alice Hattrick

Art

July 2012

Ben Rivers is an artist who makes films. Two Years at Sea, his first feature-length film, was released to...

Interview

March 2013

Interview with Billy Childish

José da Silva

Interview

March 2013

Buzzed in through the red metal door and down the stone steps into the bunker that is L-13. The...

 

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