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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...

Laure Prouvost begins to tell us about something that happened this morning She woke up with four vegetables on her duvet (a tomato, a carrot, a lemon and an onion) and four corresponding holes in the ceiling of her bedroom The vegetables must have fallen from the sky in the night, she concludes, even though they are the kind that grows out of the ground Perhaps they were a gift from a higher power, a sign that her missing grandfather, a conceptual artist and friend of Kurt Schwitters, is still alive? He started digging a hole that would reach from his house in North London all the way to Africa, but he has disappeared, leaving his wife to grow fat (apparently she eats crisps all the time) The rooms in her grandparents’ house are covered in mud, absolutely covered in mud There is mud everywhere, she says – it covers the walls and the floor and the furniture A priest has told her the vegetables probably dropped from a plane or something Vegetables dropping from a plane seems more implausible than a sign from god, even to a priest ‘Gracious goodness me!’ said Chicken-licken, ‘the sky must have fallen; I must go and tell the King’   Prouvost has been invited by Wysing Arts Centre to stage a performance Lansdowne House, situated in the Cambridgeshire countryside, to around seventy people seated on the kind of gold chairs you might find at a wedding reception (there is a marquee outside)  She speaks into a microphone, breathy and close – she is confessing after all And then she starts shouting – ‘Grandfather! Grandfather!’ Her face is red and her hair is all over the place, aping the actions of a woman in the story she is telling who regularly strips naked and jumps out of a plane with a rope tied around her ankles The woman has been calling for Prouvost’s lost grandfather too, even though, as she has just told us, he is lost deep underground She asks that we find our own way to help look for him   Prouvost makes videos, but also

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

May 2016

Two Poems

Sam Buchan-Watts

poetry

May 2016

The Dentist’s Chair       I dreamt of the dentist’s chair, that it wore a smart pair of...

feature

September 2013

For All Mankind: A Brief Cultural History of the Moon

Henry Little

feature

September 2013

For almost the entirety of man’s recorded 50,000-year history the moon has been unattainable. Alternately a heavenly body, the...

feature

August 2017

What Makes A Gallery Programme?

Pac Pobric

feature

August 2017

Of his art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Pablo Picasso once wondered, ‘What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t...

 

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