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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...

ASSORTED BAKELITE STARS Placed in startlingly elegant nooks, these stars are meant to inspire and encourage the idea of ‘night’, even though residents incarcerated in the Containment Room obviously don’t deserve such nice things Statistics show that the stars most likely to go missing are puce, gently-bruised green, dirty black, orange and fuckboy pink Small and prone to breaking, these stars are incredibly easy to remove and appropriate, but that does not mean you should do it Conversely, some stars have been found on the beach with extra arms and large insect genitalia, but as these do not fall under the purview of ‘Items That Have Gone Missing’, we will not discuss them here   ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS One hundred million dollars was allegedly left in the Containment Room by D Alamelu, aka Iyiyo Alamelu, during a ten-day incarceration period in 1997 A longtime resident of the institute and avid Kho Kho player, D Alamelu was also a notorious extortionist, who wandered the hopelessly unsafe halls with wads of foreign currency peering out from the top of her sari blouse She was attacked twice by people she knew, who took her money, beat her with a field hockey stick, and explained that this was what happened to young women who walked alone in hopelessly unsafe halls D Alamelu asked if the wads of cash made everything worse, and they said yes, because it was the truth Both times, they left her with a broken jaw, a black eye, a fractured wrist and the field hockey stick  It was only much later that she would allegedly leave one hundred million dollars somewhere on the beach of the Containment Room By then, her jaw and wrist would be completely useless And while she could still see potentially dangerous things from far away, her eye kept leaking something that smelled like a dead lizard   RECTANGULAR PORTIONS OF MATTRESSES These mattresses, crafted by local artisans and installed by a nameless global corporation, encourage the idea of  ‘beach’ in such an effective manner that they

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

poetry

May 2012

Monopoly (after Ashbery)

Sarah Howe

poetry

May 2012

I keep everything until the moment it’s needed. I am the glint in your bank manager’s eye. I never...

poetry

Issue No. 14

Interrogations

Rebecca Tamás

poetry

Issue No. 14

INTERROGATION (1)     Are you a witch?   Are you   Have you had relations with the devil?...

feature

Issue No. 15

A Weekend With My Own Death

Gabriela Wiener

TR. Lucy Greaves

feature

Issue No. 15

We all have tombs from which we travel. To reach mine I have to get a lift with some...

 

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