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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...

When not listening to the phone messages of recently deceased children or smearing those killed in stadium disasters, journalists at Britain’s largest-selling newspaper, the Sun, may find time to pen light-hearted satires of modern life One such piece was published in January 2003, depicting a new cast of ‘Mr Men’ characters that best reflect twenty-first century Britain After a handful of readers went to the Press Complaints Commission, failing to see the funny side to ‘Mr Asylum Seeker’, ‘Mr Yardie’, and ‘Mr Albanian Gangster’, a new figure was created just for them, ‘Mr Guardianista’:   He suffers bouts of guilt about the poor and homeless but tries not to let it spoil his holiday at a gîte in Provence Dare support the toppling of Saddam Hussein and he’ll choke on his organic vegetarian lunch (washed down with a subtle Chilean chardonnay) Mr Guardianista is also likely to be a student well after an age when he should be working for a living and contributing to a society he thinks owes him one   Guardian readers like myself expect, and embrace, such attacks – we are amazed that our dwindling band of Guardianistas continues to occupy such a prominent place in the national mindset Only 200,000 of us are willing to pay £140 (£230 on Saturday) for the paper, a drop of 11 per cent from last year Guardiancouk may attract over four million unique hits a day (second only to Mail Online in the UK), but the Guardian’s print readership is just over a tenth of the Daily Mail’s and half that of The Times More Britons buy the Scottish Daily Record, yet (as far as I am aware) no pejorative term exists for its patrons   Guardian staff members have enough self-awareness to understand that their work is not to everyone’s taste Last year Michael White, the paper’s assistant editor, listed the charge sheet as follows: ‘Naive, subversive, priggish, lentil-eating, sandal- wearing, feminist, humourless’ Outside of the fold, cartoonish reactionaries tend to project their personal anxieties onto the

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

fiction

September 2016

STILL MOVING

Lynne Tillman

fiction

September 2016

 I am bound more to my sentences the more you batter at me to follow you. – William Carlos...

Art

March 2013

Beyond the Mainstream and into the Digital

Vid Simoniti

Art

March 2013

Claire Bishop. Everywhere I go, some curator or artist wants to be rid of this turbulent critic.   In 2006...

poetry

January 2016

Two New Poems

Elena Fanailova

TR. Eugene Ostashevsky

poetry

January 2016

(POEM FOR ZHADAN)   This (my) country will be the death of you Its military mathematics Its secret services...

 

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