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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...

The first time I think I saw Robinson? I’d have to have been leaving Yucaipa He was on an old bike, a rusted, duct- taped contraption I imagine must’ve squeaked and rattled from a loose chain or dust in the brakes… but I keep the music up when I drive, so I can’t re-place the sound, I can’t say there was a clatter-and-drag, whether it proceeded him, or enshrined him like some moving castle of music; Robinson Lonewolf, can you see him? the mad conductor, a gypsy percussive, orchestrating a synchronized cloud of ratcheting ticks No, I didn’t see his face Why d’you ask?   –What do I say of him being faceless? I can say I’m pretty sure it was him I know you know the trick with car mirrors   The second time? Years later I was in Red Rock country, north of Vegas, just off the 15 I passed a sign that read: Valley of Fire, and, Lake Mead and I swear I saw Robinson leaned against it just like that cowboy’s silhouette you hit in  Laughlin The neon one on the border of Nevada and California— He raised his arm too, dipped his hat brim like that as I passed him   –I saw stubble on his jaw, a chain at his throat and half a smile of white teeth No No bags with him   –He must’ve been headed north to— seemed he was hitching my side of the road   Significance of seeing Robinson? Stupid question Like, what color’s the air? Who cares I just see him when I see him   Yeah That was a bad one Two years locked up, San Bernardino County Detention   No He wasn’t I drove the car alone   Then it must’ve been Orange County, at a light Yeah it was late, just past the industrial part of town, you know, where that factory sends those plumes into the sky and that new hotel offsets ‘em like a Breughel painting? Hunting- ton Beach Boulevard, off the PCH?   –I don’t know I think he was on deck or in one of those drum circles that spring up ‘organically,’ you know? I saw a crowd piled up around him… Think of Robinson with one of those little monkeys that begs for dollars and change! How funny that’d be Yeah, I know why I’m here You sure you do?   No I haven’t seen him in Yucaipa for years Since

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


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Interview

Issue No. 8

Interview with Sophie Calle

Timothée Chaillou

Interview

Issue No. 8

Sophie Calle is France’s most celebrated conceptual artist. Her highly autobiographical, multi-disciplinary work combines the confessional and the cerebral,...

Art

June 2013

Ghosts and Relics: The Haunting Avant-Garde

John Douglas Millar

Art

June 2013

‘The avant-garde can’t be ignored, so to ignore it – as most humanist British novelists do – is the...

Interview

January 2015

Interview with Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Scott Esposito

Interview

January 2015

Instructions: Take the high modernist and early postmodernist experimentalism of Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Move...

 

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