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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...

There was a sound coming out of her The stenographer was recording it It was dark in the small room and she could see the sound waves on the screen pulsing Was it a good pulse? It was hard to say Was it louder now she was bigger? People called it getting taller but she was getting bigger She was growing in perfect proportion It wasn’t like she was stretching The tallness was coming from a push that seemed to come from her feet Her feet would get bigger and then her ankles would get bigger and all the way up her body Unnoticeable to the human eye But often she would wake up and sit up and she would know she was taller Maybe it was happening equally over time, maybe it was happening in spurts She had been to an endocrinologist She suspected they all had Hormones made you grow and something had turned on all their hormones Everyone was trying to find out why It was a multimillion-dollar business because it was throwing things off in an uncomfortable way All the people that were getting bigger were normal people None of the rich or powerful people were getting taller None of them So when her boss had to tell her she was making a hash of things That maybe she needed to get better at her job – her boss found it hard because of her size Her boss had complained that he felt threatened She wasn’t sure why her boss would feel that way, at least she didn’t want her boss to feel that way She wanted her boss to feel comfortable around her But he was right to be frightened She was bigger than him by a lot and she was strong That was a secret she was keeping She was so much stronger She’d broken a couple of things None of the powerful people wanted to feel like this so a lot of the powerful people were putting a lot of money into research – to try and stop it Just stop it

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

January 2014

The Black Lake

Hella S. Haasse

TR. Ina Rilke

fiction

January 2014

Oeroeg was my friend. When I think back on my childhood and adolescence, an image of Oeroeg invariably rises...

Interview

February 2011

Interview with Manfredi Beninati

Lowenna Waters

Interview

February 2011

Time, memory, the landscape of the mind, manifestation and metamorphosis, resurgence and collapse and the crisp crust of Sicilian...

fiction

January 2016

Forgetting: Chang'e Descends to Earth, or Chang'e Escapes to the Moon

Li Er

TR. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

fiction

January 2016

Source Material   Her story is widely known. At first she stayed in heaven, then she followed a man...

 

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