Latest news with #TheBellJar
Daily Mail
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Sabrina Carpenter goes bra-free in a backless ruby red dress while sipping wine
Sabrina Carpenter wowed her fans with a series of sexy looks over the weekend. The hitmaker, 26 who stunned the audience performing with Duran Duran at last week's BST Hyde Park show, shared some sultry highlights from her European trip on Monday. Carpenter began the photo carousel with a snap of herself wearing a low back ruby red gown while enjoying a glass of white wine at an Italian restaurant. Her blonde locks were styled in a wavy bob. 'Newsflash pal,' the Please Please Please singer wrote next to the contents. 'Our princess! Italy looks good on you,' penned an adoring fan. 'TRY NOT TO SAY BELLISSIMA CHALLENGE FAILED,' asserted an admirer. Another risqué photo showed the Grammy winner reclining on a bed in an animal print body suit. Her not-so-light reading material included Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which caused some concern among her fans. Plath died by suicide in February 1963, one month after the publication of the semi-autobiographical novel. 'FOR REAL IS SHE OKAY,' asked a fan. 'I GASPED WHEN I NOTICED LMAO,' wrote another. One commenter remarked on the irony of Carpenter reading the feminist novel in light of her recent album cover, in which she is crouched on the floor with a man pulling her hair. Many have found the cover demeaning. 'With Sabrina's new cover it is really hypocritical to post this picture with Sylvia's work of art,' they claimed. Carpenter was all business in another photo, showing of her hourglass figure in a 1950's inspired gray suit with a matching jacket and flouncy skirt which she wore to the Dior Homme Menswear show during Paris Fashion Week. Her long, blonde hair was styled straight and cascaded down her back. In another photo Carpenter looked line a muse wearing a cream satin and lace dress as she stood on her tiptoes beneath a wood framed window. A more relaxed picture shows the Espresso artist wearing the same dress, lying on the floor with her legs resting against a wall in a yoga position. Carpenter shared a playful snap as she and a friend sat on a teeter-totter at a kiddie park. The hitmaker looked carefree wearing a pair of striped short-shorts with a loose-fitting yellow top and high-heel mules. The young popstar is a bit of a music historian according to the cover story in Rolling Stone. She is a big ABBA fan has named her cats Benny and Bjorn after band members Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, and often covers their songs during the 'slumber party' portion of her set. 'I don't know if there's any other artists in the world [who] make me so happy,' she said, revealing she had received a personal tour from Ulvaeus at the ABBA museum. A more relaxed picture shows the Espresso artist wearing the same dress, lying on the floor with her legs resting against a wall in a yoga position 'They just understood how to make fun of music without it feeling cheesy or corny. And even when it does you're into, because they just sell it.' She often spends her off-time watching seventies films, such as Saturday Night Fever. She credits the younger family members of people she admires for helping with intros to music legends such as Dolly Parton and Paul Simon. 'Thank God for the nepo babies,' she explained. Because they're fans of min, and I need to meet their parents.'
Chicago Tribune
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Meet the nurses who survived starched skirts and Sister Gregory
C. A. Sadlowski's St. Trudy's School of Nursing pulls back the curtain on the real-life trials, triumphs and truly bizarre realities of student nurses in the 1960s, a time when the nursing profession was cloaked in starched uniforms, strict conduct codes and the looming authority of nun-run institutions. Set in the fictional halls of St. Gertrude's Hospital School of Nursing, affectionately but forbiddenly nicknamed 'St. Trudy's,' Sadlowski's memoir-style novel tracks the bumpy, absurd and ultimately uplifting journey of Hope Sarnecki, a wide-eyed freshman from Cleveland with nothing but a scholarship and a shaky grasp on anatomy. With a voice that's part dry wit, part wounded heart and all real, Hope leads readers through bed baths, rectal thermometer mishaps, explosive dehiscence wounds, pediatric heartbreaks and, yes, a 3.2-beer-fueled night at 'The Libido Lounge.' The cast of characters, from the quietly rebellious Aggie Vespey to the smirking, steel-haired Miss Burns, are as vivid as the chemical burns from cleaning agents in the charity ward. 'It's not 'Grey's Anatomy.' It's grayer, grittier and funnier,' says the author. 'This was a time when nursing students were expected to be nuns in disguise: celibate, cheerful and tough as nails. I had to tell this story with all the humor and heartbreak intact.' Sadlowski doesn't shy away from tough subjects. The book captures the silent pain of racial inequality, the trauma of pediatric oncology and the emotional minefields of growing up female in a world that often expects obedience over opinion. But what stands out most is the camaraderie, the late-night whispering, the practical jokes and the group smoke breaks between breakdowns. 'St. Trudy's School of Nursing' is as much about friendship as it is about medicine. Readers who loved 'Call the Midwife' or 'The Bell Jar' will find themselves laughing and crying in equal measure. 'St. Trudy's School of Nursing' is published by Callaghan Publications and is now available in paperback and e-book format. To request an interview with the author or a review copy, visit her website or send her an email.
The Hindu
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
The characters one lives through
'I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked... I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.' — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar No one captured the daunting feeling of choosing who to become more eloquently than Sylvia Plath. The fear of regret from selecting a wrong path is often so strong, it paralyses us into inaction. We remain on the sidelines, hoping not to make a decision at all, until ultimately the regret we experience is not for having chosen poorly, but for not having chosen at all. By the time the realisation of a life wasted sinks in, it's too late. All we can do is watch our life pass by like a missed train, while we stand on the platform, unable to move. So is the cruelty of nature. It offers us a million possibilities but the capacity of picking only one. But man is a cunning being. He devised ways to achieve the privilege of multiple lives, a privilege reserved only for the gods. He created stories. He built worlds. He wrote books. Man found ways to slip in and out of lives through the pages of novels he wrote. Books might be man's greatest creation yet. They let him taste the grief of a father losing his son, the longing for a partner that was never truly his, the thrill of falling in love, all encapsulated in a tiny piece of paper and ink. In them, he could live and die a thousand times, without ever leaving the quiet of his room. It's beautiful, I suppose, the quiet rebellion of it, like a whispered defiance against the tyranny of a single path. Books, like any other art forms, have always represented escapism, but novels go beyond and define another world to escape into. They have always been portals, not just mirrors. In them, we don't just reflect our lives, we rewrite them. We imagine who we could have been, and sometimes, who we're too afraid to become. I've been Amir in The Kite Runner, living in Taliban-occupied Afghanistan. I've been Nora in The Midnight Library, I've felt the ache of unlived lives. I've been the nameless protagonist in Rebecca, navigating my identity in a world dominated by men. I've been Patroclus, lover of Achilles, doomed to love in silence and to die for a war that is not mine to fight. Through them, I've grieved, yearned, fought, fled, fallen, and found myself again. These characters are not strangers on a page, they are echoes of all the lives I might have lived. And in reading them, I have lived a little more than one life, and that, I think, is a kind of salvation. ananyasaraff142@
Irish Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong: Ambitious, stylish novel is like The Bell Jar for Gen Z
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies Author : Harriet Armstrong ISBN-13 : 978-1739778361 Publisher : Les Fugitives Guideline Price : £14.99 Harriet Armstrong's To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a true original: ambitious, stylish and wonderfully uncynical. It reads like The Bell Jar for Gen Z , a coming-of-age novel in which very little outwardly happens, yet we're drawn deep into the volcanic interior of girlhood. Set in an unnamed English university town, the novel follows its narrator through her final year as she attends lectures, attempts to lose her virginity and moves through a blur of dates, pub trips and club nights. These events might seem mundane but, in her telling, nothing feels ordinary. There's a piercing brightness in every sentence, a flash of insight. The narrator views the world with a kind of autistic purity, encountering everything as if for the first time, each moment lit up with sensory detail, every social exchange charged with emotion. 'I loved that night, I loved moving my body in a vague unconscious way and watching Anna and Jacob dance with each other, a sarcastic sort of dance as if they were dancing together but also mocking the idea that they might be dancing together.' READ MORE The quiet beauty of this sentence lies in its rhythm and hesitancy, its breathless build mirroring the moment's ecstasy. Armstrong's real ambition becomes clear: not simply to describe experience but to reach under it, to capture its weight and feel. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies begins as a shimmering, deeply sincere love story, but curdles into something more upsetting. The object of the narrator's affection, Luke, is pretty unremarkable. At first, the disconnect between her infatuated perception and the more banal reality is gently comic, even touching; we see what she cannot. But as her desire intensifies and loses touch with anything mutual or grounded, the novel shifts. What once felt tender becomes claustrophobic. By its final movement, the story has transformed into something closer to psychological horror, a portrait of unrequited love as a kind of entrapment, where emotion becomes a sealed and airless chamber, and the narrator is left utterly alone inside it. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is luminous, unsettling and emotionally honest. Armstrong has captured not how things are, but how they feel. In doing so, she has crafted a style that is urgently contemporary and unmistakably her own.
Indian Express
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
The age of the fig tree: Why Sylvia Plath speaks to a generation paralysed by choice
Over 60 years have passed, and yet the haunting allure of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar has not dimmed one bit; if anything, it is seeing a renaissance among the younger generations grappling with the debilitating burden of choice. A passage from the novel, now widely known online as the fig tree metaphor, has become a rallying cry for Millennials and Gen Z, spreading rapidly on social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. It is a symbol of the pervasive crisis of decision-making paralysis in a world saturated with opportunity. In the modern classic, published in 1963, Plath describes a fig tree whose branches each hold a fig, representing a different possible future: marriage, motherhood, literary success, academic prestige, adventure. As the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, a college student, reflects: 'I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.' In an age when the world is one our fingertips, for every road taken, their are hundreds of roads not taken. Choosing one future can mean closing the door on a dozen more. In such a case, an abundance of choice that should be liberating, becomes suffocating. 'One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out,' she continues. The 20s are often framed as a time for making monumental decisions: careers, relationships, where to live. For Gen Z, who face a world overflowing with options, Plath's metaphor of decision paralysis has struck a deep chord, and has become the symbol of the melancholia of an entire generation. Terrified of making the wrong choice, Greenwood can only sit beneath the tree, unable to act, watching the figs fall: 'I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.' A post shared by michelle (@inksbymich) The reflection, written in the context of the 1950s, has found new resonance in an age defined by limitless possibility. Today, people in their 20s and 30s face an unprecedented abundance of options in all walks of life, whether career paths, cities, partners, and lifestyles. 'I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.' Even seemingly trivial decisions such as how to spend a lunch break, which film to watch, what book to read become exhausting. The metaphor extends: the figs multiply, and they rot. The passage has been circulating widely online for years, often rediscovered and reposted with fervour in bursts. On Reddit, one user, shared: 'I found this excerpt from The Bell Jar today and it really nailed how I feel. The indecision makes me feel like the whole world is going by while I sit and ponder which life I want, and with all that wait, the 'figs' just rot.' 'I'm so haunted by this concept that I have chosen to believe … in a multiverse that contains an alternate universe where I make the opposite choice. I am probably too risk-averse and too afraid of hating my life to ever have a kid in this universe, but I like to think that in a different universe, I'm happily raising a great kid,' confessed another. On Instagram, users took to posting their own fig trees, with each fruit bearing a possible identity: bookstore owner, singer, writer, cottage dweller. On social media, the fig tree has become a visual metaphor, a personal inventory of dreams and possibilities. Compounding this is the social media–fuelled culture of comparison. Curated lives — seamless work–life balance, creative fulfilment, perfectly plated brunches — create a subtle pressure: to do more, choose faster, live fuller. The failure to keep up breeds a quiet sense of inadequacy. A post shared by The Fig Archives (@thefigarchives) This generation, often accused of indecision or delay, may instead be confronting the profound pressure to live multiple lives in one — to 'have it all'. There is a quiet sorrow in realising that to choose one life is to relinquish others. Some doors, once closed, may not open again. In her 1998 essay, The Mother, the Self, and the Other, scholar Yōko Sakane observes that Esther's indecision is shaped by her discomfort with traditional femininity and her refusal to identify with the women around her. Citing the fig tree passage, she wrote: 'Esther, being an intelligent college student 'with fifteen years of straight A's', could easily choose any of these figs, but she finds herself increasingly incapable of choosing even one. Her sense of loss reveals not only her 'neurotic' ambition of 'wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time', but also a sense of alienation.' For many today, the metaphor hits home. As one online collective put it: 'We all desire to experience everything. Ironically, we can only afford to pick one to sustain our day-to-day lives… Will [our passions] just wrinkle, go black, and plop to the ground?' The Bell Jar endures not only for its portrayal of mental illness and feminist unrest, but for its brutally honest confrontation with the paralysis of potential. Plath's fig tree has become a generational emblem of phantom potentials, grief for roads not taken, uncertainty, longing, and the toll of standing still. (With inputs from Anosha Rishi Kakanadan)
