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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...

Members of THE WHITE REVIEW editorial team, esteemed contributors, and friends of the magazine reveal the books they’ve been reading and revisiting in 2018     CHLOE ARIDJIS, author of BOOK OF CLOUDS   I really enjoyed LIMBO (Fitzcarraldo) by Dan Fox, WHEN WORDS FAIL: A LIFE WITH MUSIC, WAR AND PEACE (Granta) by Ed Vulliamy, and Bob Gilbert’s GHOST TREES: NATURE AND PEOPLE IN A LONDON PARISH (Saraband)   In fiction, I really admired the miniaturist beauty of Carys Davies’ WEST (Granta) This year I also revisited Bohumil Hrabal’s TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE (Abacus), a splendid little novel that packs more into its 98 pages than most books twice its length     JULIA ARMFIELD, winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018   My reading year has been characterised by sudden explosions in the midst of long dry spells Without question the most powerful of these was Elaine Castillo’s AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART (Atlantic) – a gorgeous and gratifyingly huge novel about home and finding a home, replete with food and music and spiky tenderness There was also May-Lan Tan’s short story collection THINGS TO MAKE AND BREAK (Sceptre), which I have recommended to almost everyone I know for its deadpan brilliance, its stories teeming with doubles Lastly, there was Camilla Grudova’s THE DOLL’S ALPHABET (Fitzcarraldo), one of the most purely original collections I’ve read, filled with strange and squirmy imagery, monsters and sewing machines and things with many, many legs     JULIA BELL, writer and Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck   The non-fiction books I really loved this year: Olivia Sudjuc’s EXPOSURE – a timely piece from new publishers Peninsula Press which explores among other things, why being published is much more difficult for women, and how we are often judged by a completely different set of standards In a neat pocket sized edition from a press to watch   The very much missed Mark Fisher’s blog has just been published by Repeater Books as K-PUNK: THE COLLECTED AND UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS OF MARK FISHER (2004-2016) This book is balm for the soul for anyone pissed off with the mess we’re in Clear-sighted, funny, and astute and at over 800 pages, satisfyingly hefty You won’t look like Scrooge if you gift this book I have already bought several copies   THE SECOND BODY by Daisy Hildyard (Fitzcarraldo) considers the relationship between human and animal bodies – a journey that takes her to butchers’ shops

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

December 2012

Off-Season

Miles Klee

poetry

December 2012

As a boy I went on a strange vacation with a friend. His parents took us, I can’t remember why,...

fiction

May 2012

Reflux

José Saramago

TR. Giovanni Pontiero

fiction

May 2012

First of all, since everything must have a beginning, even if that beginning is the final point from which...

poetry

October 2013

Steam

Jon Stone

poetry

October 2013

Steam in the changing rooms, stripping off after the race, breathes like an engine. The air is filled up...

 

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