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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...

Listen to her She is telling you about her adolescence She is telling you about one particular ‘bender’ that lasted three days I was getting blacked out again in the morning, she says Smoking cigarettes Nine hours in her mum’s garden, unable to stand up It disturbed her for a long time She felt sick every time she thought about it, not because she could remember it, but because she couldn’t She could only recreate it That was the only time I wished that I was dead With survival comes loss – loss of sight, of time, of your sense of self She didn’t know what she had or hadn’t done when black out drunk, could never say because she lost so much time She was there but didn’t see it happen   Anita Harris would call her a ‘have-not’ girl Adolescent girls are made to embody society’s fears and hopes for the future, and as such are judged on their capacity for self-invention Adolescent girls are expected to make good choices for themselves As Harris writes in Future Girl, they have become ‘a focus for the construction of an ideal late modern subject who is self-making, resilient, and flexible’ Not everyone can be a ‘can-do’ girl, a good Future Girl Not all young women are ‘killing it’   The woman speaking in Jordan Baseman’s Blackout, on view at TAP in Southend-on-Sea, was a ‘have-not’ girl: she drank until she blacked out, was promiscuous and deceitful, and had no regard for her health or her safety She says she didn’t do anything for five years, that now she feels in-between: matured from her problem with alcohol and yet ‘behind’ everyone else She knows some things She thought her problem with alcohol set her apart from other people That it made her ‘interesting’ – she was living in a different way to everyone else She had chosen it But she was a girl who made bad choices, consumed the wrong substances and abused her body She was not, in other words, self-making, resilient or flexible in the ‘right’ way A have-not girl is a

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

November 2014

Like Rabbits

Bethan Roberts

poetry

November 2014

When my husband unrolled the back door of the brewery’s lorry and hoisted first one cage, then another, onto...

Art

Issue No. 14

Lenin was a Mushroom

Thomas Dylan Eaton

Art

Issue No. 14

Cast as the ‘savage, ugly’ part in the Popular Mechanics live show, Necrorealists were radical artists in their own...

feature

July 2013

Love Dog

Masha Tupitsyn

feature

July 2013

11 22 2011 – LOVE DOG     For months Hamlet has been floating around. Its book covers popping...

 

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