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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...

Nothing, it seems, falls outside Maggie Nelson’s field of inquiry The author of four books of poetry and five books of non-fiction, she extends the possibilities of both forms, refusing to settle for, or into, either Unsettling definitions and reworking categories is not only the modus operandi of her writing, but also its subject matter Bluets (2009) is a whole book of what might be called poetry, about the colour blue, which is also, of course, about other things: desire, heartbreak, loss She has written two books about the murder of her aunt, Jane: A Murder (2005), which thinks through the trauma of the event, and The Red Parts (2007), a more documentary account of criminal and social justice, that accounts for new evidence that emerged while writing the first   The Art of Cruelty (2011) is a study of the avant-garde that rethinks the boundaries between art and life that much of twentieth century art worked so hard to perform By examining her own simultaneous attraction and repulsion to works of art that engage with cruelty, she makes a cogent case for both looking at, and turning away, from violence It is this kind of response – a critical model that locates value not in argument, or in partisan positions, but in receptivity, sensitivity and tenderness, that Nelson gives us a new kind – the right kind – of language through which to think both the messiness of life and the possibilities of art   Her most recent book, The Argonauts, is a love story, which is also a story about motherhood, about queerness and representation It’s a story that exists in transitional space, in the possibilities of love, the inevitable failures of intimacy, the limits of identity, the paradoxes of queer futurity and in paradigms that are constantly undergoing revision as their context shifts It explores not only what kinds of love we have to give, but what family-making (a word she hates) might mean and what good-enough mothering might entail Most of all, it considers what kind of transgressions are worthy of thinking about, what kinds of freedom we need

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

July 2014

Zone

Mathias Enard

TR. Charlotte Mandell

fiction

July 2014

I remember the day Andrija the invincible collapsed for the first time, the warrior of warriors whom we’d never...

poetry

August 2016

No Holds Barred

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

TR. Brian Hagenbuch

poetry

August 2016

Hello. Dr Rivers’ clinic? Thank you. Yes. Yes, doctor, I would like to be your patient. With your permission,...

feature

February 2011

Novelty and revolt: why there is no such thing as a Twitter revolution

Nadia Khomami

feature

February 2011

The world is seeing an increase in the use of social media as a tool for mobilisation and protest....

 

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