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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...

The guy looked disappointed when he saw me My one sales point is that I’m young, but my eyelids are so puffy they look like caterpillars, and my lips are pale and kind of caterpillary too, and so are my fingers and toes, so I’m pretty much caterpillars all over, and the problem was that the guy was fairly young himself Not as young as me – I’m only 20 – but late twenties at most, which is about the same or a little older than my friend’s brother, who drives a Soarer and got arrested for possession of crank and who I had sex with a couple of times, but it was on bare tatami mats and the mats made a creepy-looking imprint on my ass   ‘Good evening, I’m from the Snake Pit,’ I said, and the guy laughed and said, ‘“Snake Pit” – sounds like a gym for pro wrestlers’ He had a very gentlemanly-sounding sort of laugh, which put me at ease in a way, but then again it’s always the ‘sophisticated’ ones who want you to stick your tongue in their ass or smooth out the wrinkles in their ball sack and lick it, stuff like that, which I hate, so I acted very shy when I walked in, like it was my first time to do this, but I couldn’t tell if the guy bought it or not It seemed like he was experienced at this kind of thing, though, and it was one of the best hotels in the city, and the room had this giant bed, and I was thinking, Where does a young fucker like you get off, staying in such an expensive place?   While I was calling my office to tell them I’d arrived at the appointment, the guy took a bottle of wine from this ice bucket that looked like a robot’s head and popped the cork and poured himself a glass, and he seemed right at home, like he did this sort of stuff all the time I had some wine too, and I was thinking it wasn’t as good

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. 18

Interview with Eileen Myles

Maria Dimitrova

Interview

Issue No. 18

I sat across from Eileen Myles at a large empty table in her London publisher’s office a few hours...

feature

July 2014

The Fast, the Furious and the Power of Frivolity

Orlando Whitfield

feature

July 2014

The six chapters that comprise the Fast & Furious franchise thus far (a seventh is due for release in...

Feature

Issue No. 19

Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

Feature

Issue No. 19

My mother recently found some loose diary pages I wrote in my first year of boarding school, aged eleven,...

 

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