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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...

Hunt for American Heiress Continues With Bizarre Manuscript Found in Cave in Altamira By ALICE SHIFT 7:00 AM ET   A compact disc bearing a manuscript and the fingerprints of Eugenie Lund, an American heiress missing since August 19–, has been found in a cave in Altamira, Spain Dr Erik Lund, Antarctic explorer and heir to the publishing empire established by his late father, has offered a $2m reward for any information leading to the safe return of his daughter The compact disc was found by a tourist visiting the famous Paleolithic cave paintings 200 metres into the cave No further information regarding Lund’s disappearance has surfaced Below is an excerpt from the manuscript found on the compact disc   We were told that our mother’s life was terminated by killer bees while vacationing in San Marcos, Mexico with Dr Vargas at his family home Vargas described how the insects had gone for the insides of her ears – a deliberate technique to destabilise the victim Mother fell off the horse, waving her hands in the air to beat them off and hit her head on a rock Vargas thought it more prudent to spring the brutal truth upon us rather than the fiction of a prolonged hospital stay in Mexico followed by eventual death He bent down close to our faces with a pained expression and shining white teeth, miming the scene – Mother inert on the ground, Vargas swatting his way through the lethal cloud of screeching insects, his eventual defeat as he was heavily bombarded in a kamikaze-esque onslaught he likened to the attack of the USS Bunker Hill during World War II  Vargas assured us Mother was unconscious and had not suffered The killer bee specialists informed him that the perfume she was wearing (Fleurissimo, commissioned by Prince Rainier III for Grace Kelly composed of tuberose, Bulgarian rose, violet, and Florentine iris) had incited the bees to violence If she and Dr Vargas had been smoking cigarettes, the attack would never have happened Killer bees abhor smoke, even from one cigarette   Our father was in the midst

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

poetry

Issue No. 14

Interrogations

Rebecca Tamás

poetry

Issue No. 14

INTERROGATION (1)     Are you a witch?   Are you   Have you had relations with the devil?...

Interview

Issue No. 15

Interview with Zadie Smith

Jennifer Hodgson

Interview

Issue No. 15

Zadie Smith’s biography is one of contemporary writing’s fondest and most famous yarns of precocious and meteoric literary success....

Interview

September 2012

Interview with Michael Hansmeyer

Lawrence Lek

Interview

September 2012

Every project made with a computer expresses a relationship between aesthetics and technology. The historical progress of technology works...

 

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