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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...

LowerGreen is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre: a decaying quondam monument to Modernism circa-1970, in which the architecture calls to mind a cross between a spaceship and an office building from the science fiction film Brazil (1985) – severe, oppressive, featureless at first glance, and possessed of certain smooth, seductive lines at second stare There is a bargain store that sells tote bags pitched unintentionally in the key of Barbara Kruger, with the brilliantly apropos slogan WHEN I DON’T SHOP I FEEL EMPTY, and a cinema called, with some irony, The Hollywood ‘In July, 2013,’ boasts Wikipedia, ‘the cinema hosted the world premiere of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa’   It is difficult to say why Anglia Square Shopping Centre is appealing, in the same way it is difficult to pinpoint the appeal of certain human faces (The French, in coining jolie laide to describe women who are ugly but incredibly alluring, may have come the closest to elucidating this specific feeling, even if they did not necessarily intend it to describe a building) It is Brutalist, but not in the more elegant mode that tends to be salivated over by the kind of people who WhatsApp each other listings from The Modern House, or regularly eat bone marrow at St John’s, or give their children names like ‘Clementine’ It is extravagant and stately in its ugliness It is unfortunately very, very doomed LowerGreen’s final show will be this spring, thanks to a planned destruction of the shopping centre by the City Council; the area’s redevelopment is slated to cost £271 million, roughly equivalent to 54,308,617 tickets to see Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa at The Hollywood, or 184,000,000 oddly-existential tote bags Weston Homes – the developer whose aim is to replace it with ‘1,234 new homes, a leisure quarter with a cinema, car parks, a 200-bed hotel, [and] a tower block’ – have described the proposed plan as being like ‘Marmite’, which is an especially euphemistic way to say that of the 939 comments submitted to

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

fiction

February 2016

The Reactive

Masande Ntshanga

fiction

February 2016

My back cramps on the toilet bowl. I stretch it. Then I take two more painkillers and look down...

fiction

March 2017

Slogans

Maria Sudayeva

TR. Antoine Volodine

TR. Jeffrey Zuckerman

fiction

March 2017

A Few Words on Maria Sudayeva   Slogans is a strange, extraordinary book: it describes a universe of total...

poetry

August 2016

Three New Poems

Sarah V. Schweig

poetry

August 2016

‘The Audit’ and ‘Red Bank’ are excerpts from Schweig’s forthcoming book, Take Nothing With You (University of Iowa Press, 2016).  ...

 

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