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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...

1 I see your picture for the first time two summers ago, sometime in early July I am scrolling through Facebook, my forearms hurting from spending too much time at the computer, when I chance upon a picture of you with your arm around a girl I recognise from my time at art school I am taken by your face, the top half of which is covered by a pair of sunglasses, the bottom with a thick moustache You are wearing a full sleeve T-shirt, and a pair of headphones hang casually around your notably broad neck I can’t be sure given the fuzzy background, but it looks like you are standing in the middle of a busy marketplace ‘OMG full lowwww!’ someone comments beneath the picture ‘Full loweeeee1 is right!’ you reply Based on the delight on the girl’s face as she looks up at you, delirious from your attention, I assume a romantic bond I am jealous of her happiness, of her ability to hold you and look at you the way she does, in a way that I imagine I will never be able to I remember first encountering your photograph while sitting in my bedroom in my old family house in West Delhi, by the window overlooking the large sports complex with the cricket field and newly built swimming pool But this cannot be right Your photograph was uploaded on 2 July, 2016, well after my parents and I had relocated to their current house in North Delhi, in late 2013 I remember the first time I saw a series of pornographic magazines was in that old house, on a summer’s day in August 1995 Perhaps this is why my memory plays tricks on me, for I have since returned to your picture with the same furtive image-lust That day in ’95 I skipped school, pretending to be sick so that I could re-watch three video cassettes I had found in the TV cupboard some months earlier, none of which were explicit per se, but all of which contained a few

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


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Interview

April 2017

Interview with Mark Greif

Daniel Cohen

Interview

April 2017

Since 2004, when his work started to appear in n+1, the magazine he co-founded, Mark Greif has taken contemporary...

Prize Entry

April 2017

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Anna Glendenning

Prize Entry

April 2017

 1. PhD   Blue bedroom, Grandma’s house, Aigburth, Liverpool   I gave birth to one hundred thousand words. Tessellated,...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Mai-Thu Perret

Timothée Chaillou

Interview

Issue No. 1

Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s ongoing, fourteen year-old project The Crystal Frontier is a multi-disciplinary fiction chronicling the lives of...

 

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