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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...

Many years ago a large Russian man with the longest tendrils of the softest white hair came to live in the fastest growing town in Europe which at the time happened to be in the southwest of England Very little is known about why he came there or what he did with himself but one thing relating to his daily round that can be set down with utmost confidence is that whenever the Russian man needed groceries he’d fold himself into his small maroon car and drive to a retail park in the suburbs to get them And probably the reason he went to that retail park and not another was because there was a very pleasant supermarket in that retail park which aside from Saturday mornings naturally never got too busy and as such there was always an available parking space up near the exit and entrance doors and this in all likelihood suited the Russian man very well because he would likely have had tremendous difficulty finding his own car if it was only shoved haphazardly in there somewhere among all the other cars parked one after the other with cracking midday sunlight spreading out all over them diluting their already indistinguishable roofs in the practically endless carpark The Russian man’s car was fairly distinguishable for the reason that it was ancient which meant it was a distinctly vintage colour and had the finish furthermore of an old immoveable garden gate which meant it could hold its own against the suburban sun’s brash emanation But in all likelihood the Russian man did not in any case know what his own car looked like so the only way he could find it was to be certain of where he left it and this perhaps explains why the Russian man liked to park his small maroon car up near the entrance and exit doors of the supermarket which despite its commodious proportions had the familiar feel and botherless charm of a corner-shop Right there on the perimeter of this booming yet visionless town in the southwest of England   Once inside the supermarket the Russian man would seize a basket from the pile that could always be counted on to

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

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Manfred Mohr

Alice Hattrick

Interview

Issue No. 1

Lines of varying thickness rotate on black. On the screen beside, tilted away from the first, is a slide...

poetry

September 2012

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend

Cutter Streeby

poetry

September 2012

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend     [SEAside          Gra-                         –i.m. Ronny Burhop 1987-2010                                                                      ffiti]...

poetry

Issue No. 20

Two Poems

Nisha Ramayya

poetry

Issue No. 20

JOY OF THE EYES   The future is not the beginning, but the forerunner, of a new intense-formation.  ...

 

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