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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.

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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...

Isaac Goodchrist, Esq reviewed the 48-hour letter   therefore, in the strictly professional opinion of this author, the nation’s military bodies are adequately licensed, according to the language of law and the precedent of 2001’s AUMF (Authorisation for Use of Military Force), to employ all appropriate means — including deadly persuasion — against those foreign entities (or, if necessary, non-entities) as enumerated supra, including by proxy all persons, organisations, or nations abetting those entities/non-entities, age being no object, gender being no object, race being no object, citizenship being no object, faculty of mind being no object   In sum, should lethal force be applied, the powers that be should sleep swimmingly, in terms of, at least, the language of law and the facts of precedent, soporifically perfumed by the atomised skull matter of those foreign foes (of any potential age, colour, shape, or content)   Goodchrist signed the letter   His signature had the aspect of a string of bulbous grapes on the vine The page was fat stock, flecked with colour, with a smell a little bleachy and audible flap Against the dark grained wood of Goodchrist’s kitchen table, its handsome ivory popped Goodchrist recapped his pen, which he’d stolen from a Blockbusters, circa 1992, and he watched the ink sink, stain, barely bleed, and set; then, with plain horror, he looked forward and came to slow terms with the breakfast before him He thought, So food has come to this   Breakfast, Goodchrist was discovering, was stale cereal, served to him — by him — in the bile-green, becrusted dog bowl He found he had already conceded a lump to his mouth He chewed, wondered How he had arrived at supping from this lowly vessel was mystery, as were most of his other domestic movements for the past two feverish days, during which time he’d composed the letter As was lately usual, the composition period had been spent in fugue The stress of his job was wrenching the fingertips of his senses off their ledge with increasing spur In the pit below, mind was cloaca, but for the legalese flushing through   Goodchrist was a war lawyer It was his

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

Art

July 2014

(holes)

Alice Hattrick

Kristina Buch

Art

July 2014

There are many ways to make sense of the world, through language, speech and text, but also the senses...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Birch

Thomas Chadwick

Prize Entry

April 2017

1997   Business boomed. Optimism was shooting up everywhere and bursting into flower. Music was jocular. Sport was effusive....

feature

Issue No. 1

In Somaliland

feature

Issue No. 1

On a traffic island in the middle of Somaliland’s capital city, Hargeisa, is the rusting shell of fighter jet...

 

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