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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...

I was fourteen when I first transformed from Rosa into ~<*RoSaBubbLe*>~ Propelled by my adoration of Courtney Love – the lead singer of Hole, who I loved for many reasons but especially because she wrote on her stomach in eyeliner – I travelled down my first internet rabbit hole to the forums of the North American feminist magazine, Bust After school, in the living room I shared with my family, I would dwell in this private portal to a different world which could easily be shut on demand (just click the x)   Here, I found other young women, who were negotiating their similar-but-different lives Because of global capitalism we had a lot in common: they too went to Sizzler all-you-can-eat buffet for a treat with their grandparents, they too loved Courtney I didn’t speak (type) much because they all seemed more articulate than I was and because they were from North America and one was even from London, which seemed like centres of the world to me, back then in the suburbs of Sydney I learnt many things on these forums, but two have stuck with me most vividly The first thing I learnt about was zines, a decidedly low-tech cut-n-stick subculture which I readily embraced The second was something called ‘menstruation porn’, which is exactly what it sounds like I visited the slow-to-load webpage of very happy-looking bleeding people naked in the forest only once I think that, while intrigued, I was also repulsed (fully inhabiting the Freudian meaning of ambivalence), or maybe the dial-up cut out or my mum came home from the supermarket But knowing that it was there and being able to turn it over in my mind was enough Desire it seemed, was much more expansive than I had thought How curious In a world where I had already learnt to be frightened of men, the website taught me that they didn’t necessarily always get to determine how sex — and everything else — might go It was a small, quivering thought against the rest of

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

September 2011

Celesteville's Burning

Andrew Gallix

fiction

September 2011

            Zut, zut, zut, zut.             – Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps...

Prize Entry

April 2015

I Told You...

Owen Booth

Prize Entry

April 2015

1. The Triumph of Capitalism   It was the end of the cold war and capitalism had won. Everywhere...

fiction

October 2012

Girl on a Bridge

Wayne Holloway

fiction

October 2012

Pirajoux… The middle of a hot endless summer, driving on the A39 through an as always empty central France,...

 

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