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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.

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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...

Members of THE WHITE REVIEW editorial team, contributors and friends of the magazine reveal the books they’ve been reading and revisiting in 2021   This year, we’re taking our annual fundraiser online The White Review depends upon the support of its readers, and with your support we’ll continue to create space for new art and writing in 2022 and beyond   Lawrence Abu Hamdan   Kim Ghattas and I may be in parallel ideological lanes and yet the cluster-fuck constellation she accumulates around 1979, in her book BLACK WAVE (Wildfire), is a revelation (not least because we may finally have the answer here to who killed Moussa Sadr) Much closer to my filter bubble is Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller’s INVESTIGATIVE AESTHETICS (Verso) An undeviating announcement of the subversive potential of contemporary aesthetic practices The essential contribution here is that to aestheticise politics is, under the right circumstance, not to decorate or to inappropriately beautify it, but rather an essential mechanism to make it sensible I also got a lot from Harry Sword’s book/long form playlist MONOLITHIC UNDERTOW (White Rabbit), which surveys the leaking of what seems like a singular drone through genres, epochs and ideologies And from another time completely (1915) I read for the first time this year Jack London’s STAR ROVER A remarkable encounter with a book whose narrative is built from a singular question: where can the mind go when the body reaches its maximum threshold of experience?     Amy Acre   I was blown away by Natasha Brown’s ASSEMBLY (Hamish Hamilton): a searing account of everyday othering from both the maligned and the well-intentioned, with passages of staggering beauty and an ending that slayed me Similarly devastating: NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS by Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury) reveals a world painfully recognisable, utterly surprising and finally, deeply moving Late to the party, I read and loved Maggie Nelson’s THE ARGONAUTS (Melville House): radical intertextual discourse and romantic ass-fucking on the first page – what’s not to love? JEWS DON’T COUNT by David Baddiel (TLS) was a deeply personal read, moving me to confront my own feelings of Jewish shame Too many poetry books, but NOTES ON THE SONNETS by Luke Kennard

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

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...

poetry

September 2011

The Moon over Timna

Rikudah Potash

TR. Michael Casper

poetry

September 2011

In a copper house Lived the new moon, The new moon Of Timna. In a copper coat With a...

fiction

April 2014

Biophile

Ruby Cowling

fiction

April 2014

– I’m down maybe five feet. I take a moment to thank the leaf-filled rectangle of sky, and with...

 

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