Mailing List


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...

Towards the beginning of Brother in Ice, the debut novel by Catalan artist Alicia Kopf, is a photograph of the American explorer Frederick Cook arriving at the North Pole in 1908 The image, captured in the midst of a snowstorm, is blurred and the vista it discloses is of a heroic mission rendered distinctly uncertain, as limp as the flag that the man on the right attempts half-heartedly to hold up for the moment the shutter clicks On the opposite page, we read: ‘What does such a conquest represent and how is it, in turn, represented?’ The question (which exposes masculinity and conquest alike as fragile constructs) is one which this book insistently wrestles with It might be further rephrased as: ‘What is the relationship between narrative form and a history of conquest, and how might female experience figure in and as the fissure between them?’   The triangulation of personal and artistic life is the central premise of Kopf’s book, which is digressive in structure and subject matter Its intersecting arcs and tentative ruminations are perhaps most closely allied with those of the essay (with ‘the combination of exactitude and evasion’ which Brian Dillon identifies as typical of the genre) It is composed of research notes about Arctic exploration, fictional meanders on the life of a female artist, diary entries on the precarity of hopping from one creative job to another (and one elusive man to another), and illustrations that endlessly refigure how an icy landscape appears to the photographic eye Kopf’s text meditates on this question of perception, and how it relates to female creativity, as well as to the difficulties of rendering her brother’s autism legible (or illegible) on the page – taking the more typically autofictional elements of the book a little off their designated map   Kopf is interested in charting the unknown: in the impulse that sends men to the other ends of the earth; in the fragility of photography as documentary evidence and in its intimate relation to the autobiographical; and in what a fragmentary narrative technique might expose about the larger aims of plotting female

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

September 2011

Nigel

Patrick Langley

poetry

September 2011

Jamie sat alone at the edge of the dance floor and wondered how long it would be until Nigel...

poetry

June 2013

Major Organs

Melissa Lee-Houghton

poetry

June 2013

When they take my brain out of its casing it will be fluorescent and the mortuary assistant will have...

poetry

Issue No. 11

Poems from [---] Placeholder

Rob Halpern

poetry

Issue No. 11

Obscene Intimacy My soldier was found unresponsive restrained In his cell death being due to blunt force injuries To...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required