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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...

Friday 9 November 2009   The coffee is lukewarm, but she doesn’t mind to drink it this way She speeds down the freeway; she has left the coast and the San Francisco Bay behind her, she has passed through the suburban towns of Hayward Dublin Livermore and travels inland toward the central highway of the state where there are no longer suburban towns and there is no longer heavy traffic and there is the city which lies at the southern end of the interstate, and so she moves quickly, presses the gas pedal down with her right foot to move the green car through space to in some five and half hours arrive to Los Angeles And the music is loud in the car because she wants it to play loudly and she has set the volume of the music player close to its highest setting to hear Glenn Gould’s vocalisations as he plays ‘The Art of Fugue Contrapunctus XIV’ She wants the companionship of his wide hums and refracted moans to accompany the yellow-dried fields of grasses passing by her, the hills roll down the highway, the California aqueduct winks bluely once and then again at her left like a wide blue eye and she wont see it again for two hundred miles, and her own persistent noises, the noisiness of bees of the motorised car of her thinking and of Gould’s golden mouth rising above the keyboard at his fingers’ edges and up into space and his dead articulations and the dead man playing the notes and humming along to the musical notations and the speed of the car and the fugue moves her forward towards the hour she will arrive hours from now to Los Angeles and she cannot stop this day moving forward moving towards her like a barricade, the black day continues apace and the sun running across the windshield of the car ‘The service is at one o’clock at the Catholic church near her mother’s house on Pico Boulevard’   ‘It’s funny, Fyodor, it was the best sex I have ever had, but that’s not enough This

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

Prize Entry

April 2016

clerical error

Victoria Manifold

Prize Entry

April 2016

Due to a clerical error on my part, the current Prime Minister is now living in the box room...

feature

December 2013

The Horror of Philosophy

Houman Harouni

feature

December 2013

An article published in this same venue opens with a grievance: ‘We lack the philosophers that we require for...

fiction

March 2017

A Table is a Table

Peter Bichsel

TR. Lydia Davis

fiction

March 2017

I want to tell a story about an old man, a man who no longer says a word, has...

 

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