Mailing List


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...

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the Norwegian author’s life The project was born of abandon, as he has it: ‘I was looking for something and at the end I was so frustrated I thought I would just write it as it was, no tricks, no nothing… I just wanted to tell a story, which is the story of my life, basically [sic]’   There’s a shrug of false modesty here Some way into the enterprise he must have envisioned a work of literary greatness taking shape; the hints lie in the colossal scale of the work, its dark and knowing title, the decision to call the volumes novels Yet, on a structural and stylistic level, the fed-up beginnings and pared-down motives reflect the true character of the writing In his magnum opus, Knausgaard has dispensed with most of the narrative conventions inscribed in realist fiction – no plot, no genre, no varnish At first, the books read as exercises in self-scrutiny without aesthetic agenda, an uncut abundance of descriptive detail, where the absence of any clear hierarchy of interest makes for peculiarly flat prose   A passage on smuggling out beer for a New Year’s Eve party when a teenager is as vividly evoked as falling in love as an adult It’s a weird effect, disappointing for those who crave the relief of a fictive superstructure, but it gives the reader a sense of living at the level of first-hand experience, where the longing for a drink can be as strong to a boy as feelings for his wife are to a man Life is, of course, flatter than fiction makes it, without recourse to the teleological depth of a plot or the broader understanding of an omniscient narrator But it’s also closer to the written word than the more aloof products of postmodern experiment would lead you to believe Knausgaard’s achievement is not so much to tell the truth about his life, but to write it in a way that reflects that honesty, a veracious style, if you will

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

February 2012

Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

Rose McLaren

feature

February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer...

fiction

July 2012

The Pits

FMJ Botham

fiction

July 2012

Sometimes he would emerge from his bedroom around midday and the sun would be more or less bright, or...

fiction

May 2016

Panty

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

TR. Arunava Sinha

fiction

May 2016

She was walking. Along an almost silent lane in the city.   Work – she had abandoned her work...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required