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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...

Another Autumn Journal Chaos (AKA Do Not Put This to Music Because You’re How Fish Put Up a Fight)   I know what it means makes a great first line While you paid by credit card an alien inside burst out of a person Do not consider at least smarter song lyrics My mental health or something like my mental health said you were forlorn online The light of the screen was a poem about looking up at you in the shower while I was beginning to undress to be in the shower with you An egg just fell from the sky and cracked An usher came over to tell me to turn my smartphone off so I paused the movie we were streaming I’m thinking intensify most statements exchanged Yeah an egg just fell from the big grey sky We thought we were going to be late for the ballet I really hope Anonymous doesn’t blow his fucking brains out in the restaurant Anonymous started to sing in the way I used to like a young Benny Hill There were no celebrities present The sky was indigo when I told you I’d been atmospheric as a kid The ballet cast seemed so beautiful in the shower I mean wow Then we said we loved each other We got over this When Anonymous says he loves me I tell him I love him too except he got Anonymous pregnant sometimes My love is sometimes a small bird that’s a bomb You responded by saying that I make you feel like there is no fucking orchestra and then we told your face and mine I said ‘Is there no orchestra?’ You were like ‘Pure No’ We put the most beautiful thing down beneath you because you were menstruating The ballet was non-committal Involuntarily shit I was just staring at my smartphone in an insurmountable poem You said ‘That’s not the point I’m making You always panic when parking the car’ You want to make me sing again but not like a young Benny Hill I laughed like a loon off camera because you told me you hated that neither of us seemed phased by the cool rain, chronic depression or no chronic depression during sex

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

March 2014

Burroughs in London

Heathcote Williams

feature

March 2014

I first met William Burroughs in 1963. I was working for a now defunct literary magazine called Transatlantic Review...

Prize Entry

April 2015

Posman

Nick Mulgrew

Prize Entry

April 2015

After a while you memorise the steps. You read the addresses and your calves just know, hey. They just...

Art

May 2013

On the Margins

Sean Smith

Art

May 2013

 

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