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Charlotte Roche was born in High Wycombe and brought up in Germany. She grew up to become a cool young television presenter who is usually photographed peeping demurely from beneath a fringe, a German Amélie. Seconds later, though, Roche switches from psychotherapeutic solemnity to hilarity when I suggest that she probably didn't want her father to read Helen's fantasies about sleeping with her dad either. Roche has a daughter, Polly, born in 2002, whose father Eric Pfeil [de] was the producer and writer of Roche's program Fast Forward and Der Kindergeburtstag ist vorbei! ("The children's birthday-party is over"). Since 2007, Roche has been married to Martin Keß, co-founder of Brainpool, a media-company in Cologne.
Charlotte Roche offers sex (with strings attached) to Germany's president Wulff
Evidently cleanliness for health is a myth, because other than her unusual condition, she is incredibly hearty and resilient. The major part of Wetlands is made up of Helen's thoughts, reminiscences and sexual fantasies while confined to her hospital bed. A sexually active woman since she was fifteen, she has had sex with many men and boys and describes herself as continuously randy. Shortly after her 18th birthday she had herself sterilised without telling her parents about it. To that end, “Wetlands” is narrated by 18-year-old Helen Memel, who has been suffering from an anal lesion after an intimate shaving incident. The entire book takes place on the proctology unit as she recovers from surgery.
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She has a quick, dirty mind, yet somehow or other she seems oddly naïve and very sweet. As soon as she turned 18, she had herself sterilized. She wants to stay in the hospital because she hopes her divorced parents will accidentally visit at the same time and magically recognize they still love each other. The novel's basic premise is that Helen has had sex, feels great about that, and is generally at home and easy with human fluids in a way that the rest of us are not.
Books
Wetlands, Roche says, had originally been intended as a serious polemic against the tyranny of female sexual hygiene. Unsurprisingly, Helen’s obsessions turn out to be a reaction to her parents’ divorce, and to her parents themselves. Her mother is so averse to bodily function that she claims not to have bowel movements, while her father is unashamed to give her a get-well “hemorrhoid pillow.” Neither talks about her mother’s attempt to kill herself and Helen’s brother when Helen was a child.
When I was eighteen, just before my final exams, I quit school altogether and got a job at the music channel Viva. I’m still proud of the work I did in TV – it was an immense achievement for a young person. Viva launched the careers of some of the people now regarded as Germany’s most exciting actors, like Heike Makatsch and Christian Ulmen.
And she seems like such a nice girl... - The Guardian
And she seems like such a nice girl....
Posted: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 08:00:00 GMT [source]
No one in her family communicates -- even when they visit. It soon becomes apparent that Helen is so desperately into her bodily functions and pleasures because no one else -- not a lover and definitely not her mother or father -- is actually interested in her. You have to make your own way.” In the end, no pun intended, she makes an interesting choice that works out better than anyone would expect.
Early life
She must have been delighted when Schwarzer responded to the book with an open letter ticking her off for advocating a patriarchal view of sex ("you don't have the solution, but the problem"). For me, she is advocating mutual generosity – which need not mean booking yourself into the nearest brothel. The protagonist, Elizabeth Kiehl, is in bed with her husband. "I don't grab his cock at first. I reach down farther – to his balls. I cradle them in my hand like a pouch full of gold." Blimey. His magazine has drooped; he is picking his nose and staring into space. "It's all about making him happy … I want to drive him absolutely wild. First, let's tease him a little …" Reading this book is like visiting another planet, but I think I should go there more often.
Granta 166: Generations Online
As with Chuck Palahniuk, there's a consistent - and somewhat formulaic - endeavour here to gross you out. Helen is keen to inform us, repeatedly, that every squeezable, drainable, detachable substance produced by the body (hers, her lovers', or yours) can be and should be eaten - except hair, which she shaves off weekly, and ear wax, for which she shows unexpected disdain. There's no mention of belly button fluff either - but blackheads, snot, puke, pus, scabs, tears, smegma, eyelid crumbs, vaginal discharges, menstrual blood and other gunk are all acceptable fodder, especially when dried to a crust under the fingernails. "I'm my own garbage disposal. Bodily secretion recycler," she tells us proudly. The passage in which she rips open her own wound to prolong her stay in hospital is even more challenging for the weak-stomached reader. I’m convinced that in contemporary society a lot of women have a very messed-up attitude to their own bodies.
More from this person
"At the moment I just feel the pressure so strongly, and I don't understand why it's there. So I want to talk about it." At public readings women often tell her they daren't have sex with their husbands if they have not shaved their legs for one day. Roche's mother was a feminist, the sort of mum who talked about contraception and allowed her daughter to have sex at home from an early age. No one has ever brought it up in an interview, either. When I started out as a presenter, I wanted to do television in a way in which no one has ever done television before.
I can only wish that the young women who think “Wetlands” sounds intriguing will head to the erotica section of the nearest women’s bookstore first. Laid out on a hospital bed, bottom bare to the breeze, Helen ruminates at length on her body and its products. Occasionally, some oafish doctor comes in and says something oafish (this part is quite believable). Sometimes, Helen is in pain and sometimes she is hungry. But mostly, she thinks, in the great German tradition.
I wanted to point out how a lot of the emancipatory principles from the ’60s and ’70s have not yet arrived properly. In that respect, this book really is a manifesto, and I do think it has a serious message. "Yes, you're right, it would have been more logical if she had had hair. But you see, the book started off very political. But then it got very unpolitical, it just happened."
So we learn that Helen had herself secretly sterilized as soon as she reached majority, and now grows avocados instead of babies. She masturbates with the pits and simulates giving birth to them. “Eggs are a constant theme with me,” she says, before describing how one of her partners experiments with hard-boiled ones. A lot of the critical confusion about how to read the book probably stems from Roche's appealing determination not to be "an author who takes herself too seriously". But it is, for all the humour, a serious feminist book.
We meet in her home city of Cologne, and although she speaks with only the faintest trace of a foreign accent, vocabulary often escapes her. "English people always think I'm a disabled person," she laughs, "because I sound English, but then I don't know really simple words." In person she is dainty, almost exaggeratedly ladylike, and much more playfully ambivalent than the public debate about her book. "Some people don't actually get the humour," she marvels, smiling, "but, for me, writing it was laugh out loud." Helen is meant to be a complicated character, but she is merely inconsistent. She is fascinated by anal sex, her wound and its discharge, yet mortified if she passes gas in a public toilet.
Charlotte Roche was born in 1978 in High Wycombe, but was brought up and lives in Germany. She has been a highly respected presenter on the German equivalent of MTV. Anyway, never again should a true Brit complain about Germans draping their towels over sun loungers. When visiting public lavatories, Helen likes to "rub the entire seat with my pussy before I sit down". "I've never had a single infection," she adds, reassuringly. The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission.
When she uses public toilets, she likes to rub her vagina around the lavatory seat, and she has experimented with "long periods of not washing my pussy", to investigate its erotic impact - dabbing her own personal pubic perfume behind her earlobes. "It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek." There is a lot of talk about this novel being a manifesto on the female body and sexuality, an updated and 21st century “Fear of Flying.” Helen is open and adventurous and willing to explore any new avenue -- so to speak -- and she revels in her desire and need for gratification. Certainly, she has no fear of discussing her body and asking for what she wants. There is nothing coy or cute about her, not with the men and women she hooks up with, or the doctors and nurses she deals with during her hospital stay.
Back in 1965, Norman Mailer in “An American Dream” devotes at least a chapter to the subject in a celebration and embrace of the scandalous. But young Helen, though she speaks with bravado and pretends nothing she does is a big deal, really wants to challenge us and force us to question our beliefs. The book begins as if Helen is making fun of us, putting us down for our prudish attention to hygiene.
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