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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...

  Members of THE WHITE REVIEW editorial team, contributors and friends of the magazine reveal the books they’ve been reading and revisiting in 2020       Victoria Adukwei Bulley   First and foremost, The Yellow House by Sarah M Broom was a book that I’d been dying to read since I first heard about it, and to my joy it absolutely delivered Revolving around Broom’s New Orleans childhood home, this is a work that covers memoir, cultural geography, archival practice, oral tradition, and so much more Broom has such mastery of language that all of this hangs together seamlessly, and on my shelf The Yellow House lives next to Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, because I think both authors are at work on the same kind of project in each their own brilliant ways I also want to shoutout Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D G Kelley for its rich expansiveness — Kelley is an incredible writer and scholar, and there is nothing better than reading a non-fiction book where the enthusiast in the author spills through And finally, I too would like to add to the hype of Raven Leilani’s Luster, which I think is a stunning and perceptively sharp debut that glimmers with deep tenderness as well as humour     Katherine Angel   This year I was blown away by Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, which isn’t out until March 2021 (Granta) It does many things at once, in gorgeous prose I also loved Selva Almada’s Dead Girls (translated by Annie McDermott, Charco Press), about murdered women in Argentina It’s crisp, bracing, and beautiful Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine (Indigo Press, 2019) was a satisfyingly nuanced account of the terrible bind we’re in, in relation to social media I loved reading Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (UCP, 2009), which, amongst other things, explores the limits of identification and empathy as a starting-point for thought and politics — themes that recur in Bruce Fink’s Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique (Norton, 2007), which conveys what Lacanian ideas might mean in practice Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (Profile, 2020) was brilliant, thoughtful, and funny Right now I’m loving Bette

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

Art

February 2014

Starting with a Bang: Hannah Höch and The First International Dada Fair

Daniel F. Herrmann

Art

February 2014

A spectre haunted the Lützow-Ufer – the spectre of Dadaism. It hung from the ceiling and peered down from the...

feature

June 2014

Turning the Game Around

Daniel Galera

TR. Rahul Bery

feature

June 2014

Once upon a time there was – no, better: you are a thief who wanders through the cities and...

Interview

September 2015

Interview with Patrick deWitt

Anthony Cummins

Interview

September 2015

Patrick deWitt’s new novel, Undermajordomo Minor, tells the story of Lucy, a bungling young man hired to assist a...

 

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