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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...

Biography | Cattolicissimo trio composed of mother father beloved son God, why doesn’t the English language have an equivalent for –issimo?   Incidental beginnings: the mother (1951) broke off from her Milanese family in the early Seventies, got married rashly and in absence of her parents, by religious rite, for the sake of controversy, asking a cousin to be her best man She has been living in Rome with her husband ‘in exile’, as if in a colony, as if in Africa Nicola’s father (1948) was raised by a single mother, and lived with her in the council estate where they shot Una Giornata Particolare with Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren   Nico’s first eight years of life: he lives with his father, mother and paternal grandmother   The father had attended seminary Then studied architecture Fatti di Valle Giulia (the Italian equivalent of May 1968 in France): the father does not partake, because of his cousin – who he is not really in touch with – who is a Carabiniere On the matter, Nicola quotes from a Pasolini poem, which is also often quoted by his father (remember to ask which one)   The father leaves university Joins the Navy for his compulsory military service   He goes back to uni with a newfound interest in ships and submarines, which will affect his creative production via the dissemination of portholes everywhere in his projects, even on the dividing walls between two rooms, which is unpalatable to the Berengo family, as well as slanted perspectives and sequences of rooms with no connecting corridors   He is a solitary youth; he spends his life putting The Way of a Pilgrim into practice, repeating to himself over and over (when he is angered by the endless queue at the post office; when his mother’s dinner is yet again tasteless; when he inadvertently tears up the wrong drawing) Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me   Despite his marriage he keeps his boyish good looks He becomes morbidly enamoured with his son He doesn’t want him to become sophisticated During a catechism lesson when Nico is eight years old, his father taps into his own reference material,

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


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poetry

September 2011

Nigel

Patrick Langley

poetry

September 2011

Jamie sat alone at the edge of the dance floor and wondered how long it would be until Nigel...

poetry

May 2015

Europe

Kirill Medvedev

TR. Keith Gessen

poetry

May 2015

I’m riding the bus with a group of athletes from some provincial town they’re going to a competition in...

Interview

March 2014

Interview with Antón Arrufat

TR. Jennie Rothwell

J. S. Tennant

Interview

March 2014

Author of the novels La noche del aguafiestas and the experimental Ejercicios para hacer de la esterilidad virtud, Antón...

 

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