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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...

After a while you memorise the steps You read the addresses and your calves just know, hey They just know it’s going to be a long morning   These holiday homes on the steps don’t get a lot of mail The German okes who buy them park in Frankfurt all year and only fly in when winter hits Maar dis altyd mooi in die Kaap, né? Who even buys a house they don’t live in? And houses like these, too Most okes don’t see them, so they don’t even know what they’re like But let me tell you what: if I had one of these, on the beach, jir’, I wouldn’t leave   But, ja, anyway – most of these places don’t get a lot of mail Some municipal stuff, some late Christmas cards that’ll sit in their boxes until next December Sometimes I get these double – sealed envelopes met logos van strange banks al oor geskryf Most of these okes dodge tax, heyThey have to No one has that much money   Some of the okes at the depot are jealous of me They all say, ‘O, Piet, all you have to do is walk around all the laanie houses by the beach all day’ But most of them don’t know Clifton, hey They don’t know how many stairs there are Jirre fok, man, all those stairs Next time you go to Clifton 3rd, count the number of houses you pass on the stairs down Ja, and that’s my that’s my what’s the word? Ja, jurisdiction My route Yoh, they would die in a day if they had my job And like, none – none of these houses have driveways No paths All of these houses are on the steps, going down the cliff No other way in   No, you have to chain your bike to the rails on the side of Victoria Road – ja, chain it with a combination lock because the skollies will take it quick – quick, even a Post Office bike, hey , they’ve got no skaam – then take the stairs down Ja, the stairs Fifty down, fifty

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

April 2014

by Accident

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic...

poetry

May 2011

Two Prose Poems From 'The Sacrifice of Abraham'

Alexander Nemser

poetry

May 2011

The Rabbis   As the purple light of evening descended, women sang blessings over silver candelabra, and a group...

fiction

January 2014

Vertical Motion

Can Xue

TR. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

fiction

January 2014

We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert. The people on Mother Earth can’t...

 

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