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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...

Guiding issue 31 of The White Review are questions of survival How to carry on in the aftermath of catastrophe? How to reckon with the spectres of history? How to transform an ordeal into something liveable – or even something pleasurable?   Within these pages, violence is the subject of scrutiny and polemic, but wounds and weapons are also reimagined The issue begins with Lina Meruane’s darkly erotic short story ‘Deeper’, translated by Megan McDowell, in which a woman refuses to sew up a surgical lesion because she’s found another use for her ‘new opening’ In ‘Seaglass’, a personal essay on displacement and loss in Libya and Lebanon, Moad Musbahi uses washed-up glass as a metaphor for ridding shrapnel of danger Issue 31 also contains two startling works of short fiction by Pip Adam, in which people begin to grow so large that the rich and powerful arrange for their disposal, an essay by Philippa Snow on Anna Nicole Smith, who lived and died in the image of her idol, Marilyn Monroe, and a letter to England by Thomas Glave, in which the author addresses the legacy of the British Empire Elias Rodriques explores the role insomnia, music and kinship play in the lives of a Jamaican family who relocate to the US, and Celia Bell’s anti-fable, ‘The Magic Dollar’, tells the tale of a woman who murders her own conscience There is poetry by Fran Lock, Kimberly Campanello and Shripad Sinnakaar, Fernanda Melchor discusses her love of horror and nota roja (a form of sensationalist journalism popular in Mexico), and Anuk Arudpragasam reflects on writing about the Sri Lankan Civil War and its aftermath   ‘Maybe I could just catch a shaft of light, and something could transform’, the artist Jamie Crewe says in a far-reaching interview, in which they discuss using the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice – the story of a woman consigned to live in darkness – as ‘a way of talking about transness’ Crewe rephotographed a scene from the animated video Pastoral Drama (2018) especially for the cover of The White Review, and a series of stills from

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


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fiction

December 2016

The Giving Up Game

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

December 2016

The peculiar thing was that Astrid appeared exactly as she did on screen. She was neither taller nor shorter....

Art

March 2016

Seeing from behind: Park McArthur

Anna Gritz

Art

March 2016

In a public conversation between Park McArthur and Isla Leaver Yap that accompanied the former’s exhibition Poly at the...

Art

Issue No. 2

From Back Home

J. H. Engstrom

Art

Issue No. 2

In his collection From Back Home the Swedish photographer JH Engström traced his childhood memories back to the province...

 

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