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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...

Spider n (Skinner thinks this word softened from spinder or spinner, from spin; Junius, with his usual felicity, dreams that it comes from σπιδειν, to extend; for the spider extends its web Perhaps it comes from speiden, Dutch, or spyden, Danish, to spy, to lie upon the catch Dor, ðora Saxon, is beetle, or properly a humble bee or stingless bee May not the spider by spy dor, the insect that watches the door?): The animal that spins a web for flies Trolmydames n s: of this word I know not the meaning Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755)   ***   A tip for users: when choosing the right word to shout at a departing figure, concentrate on how much your throat can handle The door slammed behind you an hour ago, which means I must have been sitting on the bed like this for a smidge over two I’ve only just noticed the spider up there, however, Miss Muffetting a ragtime beat untimidly above the curtain-rail It is making come-hither gestures at me Valiant, I throw the closest thing to hand directly at it The closest thing to hand happens to be your pyjamas which you had forgotten to pack   Aphaeresis is the process whereby a word loses its initial sound or sounds, as in ’twas and knock Sounds are lost from the ends of words through apocope, literally ‘cutting off’: you can see it in the dangling useless b of a tail trailing, dumbly, behind lamb, the silent b of a lame dumb lamb, where b is a tuft of wool left on the wire once the flock’s moved on, a ghost-marker   Apocope comes from a different root than apocalypse, to disclose   The thrown pyjamas got halfway to the spider then crumpled in mid-air They became floor In the same way that when a black cat yawns there is a sudden unexpected new colour and potential violence to the equation of a scene, your crumpled silk pyjamas changed the room They sprawled a glowing chalk outline on the carpet The spider responds to my inroads upon

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

Issue No. 2

The Surrealist Section of the Harry Ransom Center

Diego Trelles Paz

TR. Janet Hendrickson

fiction

Issue No. 2

To Enrique Fierro and Ida Vitale—   Just like you, muchachos, I didn’t believe in ghosts, and if I’d...

poetry

September 2011

Sleepwalking through the Mekong

Michael Earl Craig

poetry

September 2011

I have my hands out in front of me. I’m lightly patting down everything I come across. I somehow...

Interview

March 2016

Interview with Han Kang

TR. Deborah Smith

Sarah Shin

Interview

March 2016

Han Kang is a disquieting storyteller who leads the reader into the very heart of human experience, where the...

 

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