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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...

4    It’s New Year’s Eve, I’m standing newly divorced on a roof in a town, we toast the rockets wobble on their way what a party what an opportunity, almost an imperative to think something and do something about what you’ve thought   I think   I’m here now   I think   What do I need   Consumption inspires strength of mind even though it’s mindless but that’s a bad sentence to start a new year with, even though it’s true   I need: new beginnings, new maxims, new year’s resolutions   Of others I know only that it sucks the life out of a human being never to say thank you and to thank too much you have to do your own thing, put yourself first   or precisely don’t think so much don’t follow your desires, but pursue them and hope you don’t turn into some kind of monster on the way a monster that pulls things off the shelves with a dead automation and is itself anderswo engagiert and moreover has been so for a long time a monster that rattles around with its shopping trolley   A new year’s resolution: Don’t listen to too much twaddle that separates you from yourself but that’s difficult to live up to that’s why you need a resolution   A new year’s resolution: Listen to much and many because you can’t know beforehand what you’re missing what you’ll miss due to prejudice and stupidity so let it be a new year’s resolution to be less prejudiced and lazy and stupid but that’s difficult to live up to   I’m here now in the midst of life   Life which like time shifts restlessly in the sofa but never goes away life which is the opposite of death and death which is a euphemism for somethingorother orgasm, happiness, peace at long last, some peace and quiet imagine! to be able to just lounge  in the big, silent house where only tiredness moves   A new year’s resolution: Try not to read everything as if it were entrails or coffee grounds try not to long for everything too much try not to apologise for everything the apology is like the thank you a stupid place to be conscripted fanaticism is so unbecoming   I speak to myself in the imperative: Remember! that everyone knows a handful of psychopaths who live their lives as though they were the only person in it these people aren’t capable of much apart from working and partying and

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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Interview

November 2013

Interview with Javier Marías

Oli Hazzard

Interview

November 2013

Javier Marías is one of Spain’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists. He began writing fiction at an early age –...

Art

March 2014

Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting

Paige K. Bradley

Amy Sillman

Art

March 2014

The heritage of conceptualism and minimalism leaves a tendency to interpret a reduction in form as intellectually rigorous. If...

poetry

Issue No. 8

The Cloud of Knowing

John Ashbery

poetry

Issue No. 8

There are those who would have paid that. The amount your eyes bonded with (O spangled home) will have...

 

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