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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...

Taxi The taxi stopped and Henry climbed into the taxi The taxi driver went around the block three times before finally deciding to head to the train station Henry thought about complaining but the bag was bulky and cumbrous, his arms were arching, his hands were red, and so the three times around the block helped with restitutio in integrum Henry had been reading Latin They say it is language in a state of moribundity It is not yet dead and so the death scene can be compared to Othello’s Henry had also been reading Shakespeare, something at school he had omitted with the help of cigarettes and a coquettish thirteen year old that showed her underwear for the last two drags on the cigarette She always wore white cotton panties Now Henry dreamed of white cotton panties At the time he thought the girl and her white cotton panties a parasite, not worth the energy to expel the spit in his gob He always handed over the cigarette smeared with his spit The girl never seemed to mind She pulled on the cigarette as though it was very dangerous and she was behaving very naughty The morning sun made Henry feel uncomfortable He would have liked to change places with the bulky and cumbrous bag which was in the shade The taxi driver was no longer looking up the long road; his eyes had been diverted by a pair of long legs Henry and taxi driver eyed the woman about to cross the road She was wearing a fancy black dress and the pearls around her neck caught the sun The taxi driver slowed down the taxi Henry had to lean over and rest his elbows on the bulky and cumbrous bag The woman walked into the road and was hit by a van The van stopped The taxi had to stop Henry almost broke his neck The woman in the middle of the road was dead A pool of blood was slowly forming around her Henry thought of Desdemona A crowd gathered around her as flies around

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

Sleepwalking through the Mekong

Michael Earl Craig

poetry

September 2011

I have my hands out in front of me. I’m lightly patting down everything I come across. I somehow...

fiction

January 2016

Eight Minutes and Nineteen Seconds

Georgi Gospodinov

TR. Angela Rodel

fiction

January 2016

The minute you start reading this, the sun may already have gone out, but you won’t know it yet....

Interview

May 2013

Interview with Darian Leader

Kishani Widyaratna

Interview

May 2013

A practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, Darian Leader is one of a dying breed. It is no overstatement to say that...

 

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