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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...

First of all, since everything must have a beginning, even if that beginning is the final point from which it cannot be separated, and to say cannot is not to say wishes not, or must not, it is simply impossible, for if such a separation were feasible, we all know that the entire universe would collapse, inasmuch as the universe is a fragile construction incapable of withstanding permanent solutions – first of all, the four routes were opened up Four wide roads divided the country, starting from their cardinal points in a straight line or ever so slightly bent to follow the earth’s curvature, and therefore as rigorously as possible tunnelling through mountains, dividing plains, and overcoming, supported on pillars, passing over rivers and valleys Five kilometres from the place where they would intersect, if this were the builders’ intention or rather the order received from the royal personage at the appropriate moment, the roads divided off into a network of major and secondary routes, like enormous arteries which had to transform themselves into veins and capillaries in order to proceed, and this self-same network found itself confined within a perfect square which clearly measured ten kilometres on each side This square which also had started out, bearing in mind the universal observation that opened the story, as four rows of trig points set out on the ground, subsequently became – once the machines that opened, levelled and paved the four roads appeared on the horizon, coming, as we said, from the four cardinal points – subsequently became a high wall, four curtain-walls which could soon be seen, as was already clear from the drawing- boards, delimiting a hundred square kilometres of flat or levelled ground, because a certain amount of clearing had to be done Land chosen to meet the basic need of equidistance from that place to the frontiers, a relative advantage, which was fortunately confirmed later by a high lime content which not even the most optimistic had the courage to forecast in their plans when asked for their opinion: all of this simply brought

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

Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

Feature

Issue No. 19

My mother recently found some loose diary pages I wrote in my first year of boarding school, aged eleven,...

fiction

April 2014

by Accident

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic...

fiction

September 2015

The Afternoon

Wolfgang Hilbig

TR. Isabel Fargo Cole

fiction

September 2015

Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival. With the word...

 

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