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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...

 ‘So I turned around for an instant to look at what my field of vision onto the sea had not offered up: the heavy grey mass where traces of planks lined up along the inclined ramp like a tiny staircase I got up and decided to have a look around this fortification as if I had seen it for the first time, with its embrasure flush with the sand, behind the protective screen, looking out onto the Breton port, aiming today at inoffensive bathers, its rear defence with a staggered entrance and its dark interior in the blinding light of the gun’s opening toward the sea’ – Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology   It is October 2010 and I am in the kitchen of an old house in Sussex From the kitchen, a door leads to the hallway Suddenly the door begins to sway from side to side At first, I think nothing of it and put it down to a breeze from another room But then the swaying became more deliberate, as if a presence were trying to communicate from afar The door moves to one end, pauses for a second, and then proceeds to return to the other side To and fro it moves, until suddenly, and without warning, it stops As I stand to investigate, an iridescent light fills the hallway, and a tall silhouette clad in black slowly crosses the landing before disappearing into the brick wall In response, the skin on my body becomes clammy with anxiety, while the hairs beginning at the base of my head and extending to the lower reach of my neck recoil, as if they had grasped some kind of horror that I was still in the process of experiencing One minute later, I am on the street Disturbed by the vision, I look at the house from the vantage point of the outside If the figure has come to me in a moment of private intimacy, then I am sure it would not follow me down the stairs and onto the other side of the street, and thereby expose

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

December 2011

Egyptian Revolution: Bloody Wednesday (2 February 2011)

Omar Robert Hamilton

feature

December 2011

Almost one year on from the first battles in Tahrir Square, Egypt’s future remains uncertain. Many Egyptians believe that,...

Interview

Issue No. 16

Interview with Gary Indiana

Michael Barron

Interview

Issue No. 16

In July 2015, T: The New York Times Style Magazine gathered twenty-eight ‘artists, writers, performers, musicians and intellectuals who...

feature

Issue No. 19

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 19

‘A crisis becomes a crisis when the white male body is affected,’ writes the philosopher Rosi Braidotti, interviewed in...

 

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