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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...

    Saturday       On March 19, at 1 pm in a café off Turnacibaşı St, an Italian man could be seen summoning the courage to ask two women if he could take their picture Like most Istanbullus in Beyoğlu then, we were making fevered use of our phones ‘I suppose so,’ my friend looked up, ‘but I’m a bit hungover’ Even with dirty hair, she was radiant enough to make anyone invent excuses for a longer look   It was a Saturday The man said he was a journalist Four hundred metres away, limbs were strewn over European Istanbul’s main shopping street Ninety minutes ago, someone blew himself up on Istiklal, but that wasn’t why the man was asking He didn’t know Raja looked distressed for someone who counseled activists in countries that pitched on the waves of foreign opportunism and domestic corruption He couldn’t know that, poised as she was, it was not unthinkable that she would rather credit her fraying composure to intemperance than shock at the government’s crumbling security façade He just pulled his Nikon D300 off the table and started fiddling with the settings   For the first time in three years, surveillance helicopters flew over the neighbourhood   The Turkish language differentiates starkly between past events we have witnessed and those whose existence comes to us by hearsay Events reported by others are distinguished by adding –mIş to the end of the verb or nominal clause ‘Ben seni sevdiğimi dünyalara bildirdim,’ the first line in a Black Sea folk song made famous by Kazım Koyuncu, means ‘I let the world know that I love you’ It happened, and I know because I told everyone Moreover, I did the thing ‘Ben sana doyamadım,’ the song’s final line begins: ‘I couldn’t get enough of you’ These are emotional certainties There is no temporal or physical distance between their occurrence and my knowledge of them   At the other pole of perception are actions that not only did we not execute, but which we did not see or hear That you heard (‘sen duymuşsun’) of my betrayal through

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

November 2012

Religion and the Movies

Aidan Cottrell Boyce

fiction

November 2012

When the Roman Empire ruled the world, you could make it work for you. The women, the hospitality. You...

poetry

November 2011

One Night Without Incident

Eoghan Walls

poetry

November 2011

Freak July mists blurred all from Portsmouth to Reading in a late summer sky turned wholly unfit for bombing,...

feature

September 2013

For All Mankind: A Brief Cultural History of the Moon

Henry Little

feature

September 2013

For almost the entirety of man’s recorded 50,000-year history the moon has been unattainable. Alternately a heavenly body, the...

 

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