Mailing List


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...

It was not only avoiding thoughts of home that helped the good sniper to carry out his mission as he lay on the roof of a building in Tulkarem It was not only the disconnection from his mother, that not thinking about her constituted a kind of rest for him Sniper number two, Hai-Ad Gonen, had given him a bit of cocaine earlier, and Dael could already feel its blessed effects Dael Gruber, who all the guys in the army and in civilian life called Gruber due to the difficulty in pronouncing the two vowels one after the other, was regarded by his friends as a sensitive sniper with a delicate soul And indeed, he was an example to contradict what people generally say about snipers in armies, that they detach themselves from feelings and simply say to themselves, ‘Someone has to do the job,’ and execute their task with cold-blooded composure   This was a sweeping generalisation, and it didn’t apply to Dael Dael went for it in a big way, in other words he shot to kill, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked for him It’s a question of psychological makeup Sometimes it was a little hard for him to shoot at a concrete target, but then he concentrated and took targets from his life instead and set them up in his imagination in the place of the wanted man In many cases he imagined the father of Moran Eliot, his girlfriend when he was at the end of the eleventh grade, when she was at the end of the twelfth grade   Moran Eliot was his first love It lasted for June–July–August and half of September Moran was his first, but he wasn’t her first, and she said that after the first it didn’t matter anymore what number he was It ended badly between them, and with hindsight he didn’t care Her father was in his sights because he threw Dael out of the house in the most humiliating way, after Moran didn’t want to see him and called him a

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 2016

Colonel Lágrimas

Carlos Fonseca

TR. Megan McDowell

fiction

September 2016

The colonel must be looked at from up close. We have to approach him, get near enough to be...

fiction

September 2011

Celesteville's Burning

Andrew Gallix

fiction

September 2011

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

Prize Entry

April 2017

The Critic of Tombs

Ethan Davison

Prize Entry

April 2017

Emilia came to Tombs [1] in the twelfth year of the interregnum. It was the first time in history...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required