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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 SF vs NY   Anna Wiener found herself in the right place at the right time That is, if that was what she wanted At the beginning of Uncanny Valley, her memoir about working in Silicon Valley in the middle of the 2010s, Wiener is 25 and working as a publishing assistant in New York Her mother is wondering why she’s still taking coats and serving coffee She isn’t asking her daughter for a structural explanation about the recession and job prospects for Wiener’s generation, nor how Wiener imagines a future within the publishing industry’s idiosyncratic hierarchies and ‘shabby, nostalgic glamour’ She’s asking where Wiener’s career is going, if anywhere This is the tenth page of the book and Wiener seems unconvinced as well: her descriptions of the uniform aesthetic of a publishing career – wrap dresses, sad salads for lunch at your desk, parties where you only talk to the people you already know – are funny, but also expose an existential uncertainty that Wiener will replicate when she moves to San Francisco At this stage in her career, Wiener writes, ‘my desires were generic I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued I wanted to be taken seriously’   Of these desires, Silicon Valley could give her one: the money Wiener’s career in the technology industry begins somewhere familiar for her: one day at her desk in the literary agency, she reads about a startup dedicated to reading, whose founders had raised three million dollars (she didn’t know then that that was not a lot of money in startup terms) She writes to them because she’s interested, impressed, and feels she could contribute using her background in publishing and love of literature, while participating in the contemporary economy If this is where the book trade is going, Wiener wants to be part of it: the startup offers a way for her to change everything while holding on to what is

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

July 2012

Theatre's Arab Turn

Tanjil Rashid

feature

July 2012

Apart from the odd Shakespearean exception, from Othello the Moor of Venice to the Merchant of Venice’s marginal Moroccan...

feature

Issue No. 17

Ada Kaleh

Alexander Christie-Miller

feature

Issue No. 17

When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May...

Art

December 2013

When We Were Here: The 1990s in Film

Masha Tupitsyn

Art

December 2013

‘I remember touch. Pictures came with touch.’ -Daft Punk, ‘Touch’   In the 1990s, three important pre post-reality films...

 

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