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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...

 ‘ and the siege dissolved to peace, and the horsemen all rode down in sight of the waters’  St John of the Cross     Friday, March 20 As I saw the lights of Mexico City spread out below us before landing I caught myself mentally humming the tune of ‘Volver’ – an unbearable affectation Just as Carlos Gardel sings in that classic tango the snows of time have silvered my temples His turned silver because he was away for twenty years, mine because premature gray hair runs in my family: I’m condemned to suffer low-impact  drama I remembered my grandfather saying that Agustín Lara was a hick whose one single virtue was that he liberated us from the tango thanks to his impossible talent for composing boleros Then I forced myself to think about Guadalupe Trigo, the later improviser of boleros, who says that at night the city dresses up like a mariachi But that doesn’t really describe it: it’s more like the Milky Way, a sacred host of fire which you must swallow whole, without – chewing I wonder what Teresa would think if she could see me with so much gray hair Since I bought a computer for my apartment and managed to get myself online, I’ve been back in touch with el Distrito Federal They tell me that she’s been living in Mexico ever since she broke up with my student, that when she runs into one of our mutual acquaintances she always asks about me I doubt that she’s weathered the silent ravages of time very well either   My mother and my sister picked me up at the airport I will stay with them for the weekend and on Monday I’ll go over to Raul’s apartment: my family’s house is too crowded – there I’ll be better able to practice the monkish discipline to which I’m accustomed They’re not happy with the idea, but they realise that it’s better than nothing I’m going to stay with Raul through the week, then

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

feature

February 2011

Red Shirts in Thailand

Sam Brown

feature

February 2011

The closest I had ever come to a protest was in 2003, in Bangkok, when I tried and failed...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Sun Yung Shin

poetry

September 2016

  Autoclonography   for performance   In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human...

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

 

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