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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...

Benson’s Syndrome   Grapefruit I have lost the word for it Popillo? Popello? No, no It escapes her, the word, she tries to dig into the layers of memory, a time when she used to know only this language, only this rhythm, this inflection, when she used to know the small of your back, or the ribs that sometimes pushed through your skin, but it fails her, it is always out of reach, hiding behind her second language that is now her first, a senseless language with silent letters: apostle, knot, doubt     Assignation   An appointment to meet someone in secret, typically one made by lovers We were never lovers, but no one will ever as easily cover me in goosebumps     Cavities   It was in Paris where I broke my tooth, the lower left second molar, while chewing the bread with the engraved cursive P upon its breast, brought at Poilâne on rue Debelleyme in Le Marais It was our first trip together as adults The lines in my face were settling in, laugh lines, I used to laugh then We had woken up early to walk there in the rain, a slight drizzle, and I was excited by the unevenness of the cobblestone, how I tripped at almost every step, how loud the automobiles sounded when they approached   The woman at the counter of the boulangerie asked if I wanted the whole loaf or the half, she directed the question to me as if she knew I would pay, as I often do I was surprised by her immediate knowledge of us, and by the smell of the dough rising just out of sight, which reminded me of my father’s calloused hands, how they could be violent but also subtle He used them to make gnocchi in our small kitchen   I did not understand her French, so she made wide shapes with her large palm, and then I understood but could not decide between the two choices, whole, half, you did not make eye contact to help me, so I told her yes, oui, the whole loaf, and made the

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

feature

Issue No. 19

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 19

‘A crisis becomes a crisis when the white male body is affected,’ writes the philosopher Rosi Braidotti, interviewed in...

Interview

November 2014

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

J. S. Tennant

Interview

November 2014

Juan Goytisolo is one of Spain’s leading writers, but one with a fraught relationship with his home country, to put it...

Prize Entry

April 2016

Seasickness

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2016

‘How would you begin?’   She puts a finger to her lips, a little wrinkled still from the water,...

 

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