Latest news with #Ruth
Daily Record
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Eamonn Holmes' brutal dig at Ruth Langsford with cutting soulmate remark about new girlfriend
Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford split last year after 14 years of marriage and the GB news star has since moved on with his new girlfriend. Eamonn Holmes has made a brutal dig at his ex-wife Ruth Langsford after reportedly saying that his girlfriend Katie Alexander, 43, is his "soulmate". Ruth and Eamonn, both 65, sent shockwaves through the world of showbiz when they revealed they were going their separate ways last year. The former This Morning stars were believed to have one of the strongest marriages in the entertainment industry. However, after calling it quits Eamonn moved on with relationship counsellor Kate, who he has already holidayed in Ibiza with, while Ruth stayed quiet. The pair look very loved up in some recent snaps after attending GB News star Nana Akua's engagement party together earlier this month, the Mirror reports. According to Bella magazine, the dad-of-four gushed that Katie was his "soulmate" during the glamorous bash in London while also reportedly quipping: "In sickness you find out who is there for you." Commenting on the apparent dig, an insider said: "It was an insensitive comment from Eamonn, but he's smitten with Katie and does feel like she has been there for him through the hard times. "That said, it is a kick in the teeth for Ruth because she has been there for him since the beginning." Eamonn is now often seen in a wheelchair due to his chronic health problems after having a double hip replacement and spinal surgery. Meanwhile Ruth was recently spotted without her wedding ring for the first time in more than a year after the split. There appears to be 'no turning back' for the Loose Women veteran who announced her shock split with her husband of 14 years last May. A source told OK! that ditching the ring after such a long time was a significant move on Ruth's part. The insider close to Ruth said: 'Removing that ring might have been a shock to fans, after she's worn it for so long. But it was the final bit of closure. It was a message to Eamonn and symbolic that Ruth's marriage and that chapter of her life is over. "She's closing the door on her past for good. Taking it off is Ruth saying, 'I've moved on, it's all behind me.' She's just desperate to get this divorce out of the way, now. There's no turning back.' Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Ruth, who shares 23-year-old son Jack with the GB news star, posted a recent Instagram video which showed her making one of her 'favourite summer dishes' – a 'colourful, no-cook salad'. It's not the first time the star, who is now locked in a divorce battle with Belfast born Eamonn, has shared her cooking talents on social media. However, it is the first time she's done it after quietly removing the wedding ring on her left hand.
Atlantic
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
A Lonely Portrait of Lifelong Friendship
The English novelist E. M. Forster believed that people know the characters in the novels they read better than they know one another. In fiction, he argued, a character's true nature and deepest secrets are plainly available, whereas 'mutual secrecy' is 'one of the conditions of life upon this globe.' This idea is strikingly isolating. Can it possibly be true? By the end of Stephanie Wambugu's debut novel, Lonely Crowds, I could see where Forster was coming from. Following the decades-long convolutions of an intense and volatile friendship between two women, Ruth and Maria, Lonely Crowds poses similar questions about the limits of personal relationships. As the girls grow older and their unhealthy childhood patterns repeat in adulthood, their friendship begins to seem more dangerous than idyllic. Perhaps the most prevailing myth about childhood friends is that they know each other completely and love each other best. Wambugu counters such sentimentalism by revealing the many secrets and misunderstandings at the core of Ruth and Maria's friendship. In their world, a lifelong bond is not a comfort but a liability. Lonely Crowds begins in the contemporary present with Ruth, as an adult, seeming very lost at her own birthday party. As the novel's title suggests, a crowd full of people can be a remarkably lonely place. 'That Maria wasn't here at the party was a source of great distress,' Ruth thinks, blowing out the candles. Ruth recalls that when she met Maria years ago, 'I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live. I'd forgotten. Now, I remembered.' Despite her success as an art professor and painter, Ruth feels adrift and bitter. She thinks she sees Maria everywhere. As she falls asleep the night after her party, she recollects her history with Maria, starting from the beginning. Ruth's obsession with Maria sparks from their first encounter, in a uniform shop for the Catholic school where they will soon be classmates. The scene is a small spectacle of shame: Ruth watches while Maria's aunt tries to buy a uniform for Maria on layaway, promising to pay when her disability check comes through. The owner refuses and castigates Maria's aunt in front of a long line of customers, throwing the two of them out of the store. As they leave, Ruth makes eye contact, and Maria 'looked back at me as she crossed the threshold, wide black eyes, perfect. Then she was gone. I felt doomed.' Ruth decides she will befriend the girl at her new school and spends the rest of the summer besotted with the idea. Maria and Ruth meet again on the first day of third grade at Our Lady in Providence, Rhode Island, where the two are the only Black girls in their class. They're the same age, but to Ruth, Maria seems much older and wiser. During their first real conversation at school, Maria brags about her pearl earrings, a gift from a teacher, offering to let Ruth borrow them if she's careful. 'Oh, I'm not careful,' Ruth responds. 'I'm careless.' Her utterly honest response demonstrates Wambugu's knack for capturing the humor of childish intransigence on the page. But the scene also looms large for young Ruth: Maria's earrings represent the mysterious world of adults, one that Ruth is hungry to learn more about. That the gift is inappropriate simply does not register for her. Ruth is an only child, sheltered by her parents, who are Kenyan immigrants to a working-class neighborhood in Pawtucket, outside of Providence. Her mother values hard work and minding one's own business, while her father is 'lonely, mercurial, romantic,' often changing jobs and exacerbating marital tensions. Ruth's upbringing is strict but stable. Maria lives with her aunt, who is severely bipolar, after her mother's death by suicide. The girls' first playdate sets the stage for the uneven dynamic they'll share for the rest of their friendship. After inviting Maria home from school with her, Ruth reminds herself to 'come across as measured, impassive, and confident.' By the end of supper, Maria's politeness and intelligence have charmed Ruth's parents. But the success of the evening is punctured when Maria, as she is leaving, turns around to ask Ruth, 'What's your name again?' Although Ruth never tells the reader how she feels about the question, nor how she responds, the moment feels pivotal, capturing how Ruth's earnestness and longing are so often met with coolness, even rejection. But she soon wins Maria over, and eventually Maria comes to be a part of Ruth's family. Like her biblical namesake, Ruth is loyal and steadfast to her friend, while Maria is independent and creative, often controlling the narrative of their relationship and even determining their future trajectories: Maria is an extrovert, so Ruth must be an introvert. Maria is the type to never settle down, while Ruth is going to get married. Ruth always looks to Maria for advice and approval, and Maria's responses to her vary among love, tolerance, and disgust. Reading scene after scene in which Ruth is so passive can be frustrating. She is content to be molded by Maria, unaware of the danger: She is becoming a person who knows herself only in relation to her friend. When Maria decides she wants to be an artist in New York, the girls both apply to and get into Bard College, where Ruth takes up painting and Maria studies film. Maria sees this moment as her great escape from bleak Pawtucket, while Ruth worries that she, too, is part of the past that her friend wants to leave behind. Maria is clear about one thing. 'When we go to school, we have to go our own way,' she tells Ruth. 'We don't have to be together all the time. We still can be close and be … separate.' In college, Ruth and Maria do pursue different paths and new relationships. The biggest test of their friendship comes when they move to New York City after graduation and both try to make it in the art world of the 1990s. Their childhood competitiveness grows into an adult professional envy: Where Maria meets easy success as a filmmaker, Ruth's path is more complicated, riddled with self-doubt and jealousy. Like a piece of cherished childhood clothing, their friendship appears more and more ill-fitting as time passes. The two grow apart, not because they change, but because they do not; they are stuck in the same dynamics, unable to find new ways to connect to each other. As the novel progresses, Ruth often stops existing on the page, overtaken by her endless loops of fixation on the thoughts and feelings of others. In part because the reader has no insight into Maria's perspective, Ruth's narrative voice makes it hard to discern what either woman gets from their friendship, or even the extent to which they know each other at all. I don't believe that Maria enjoys Ruth's overbearing attention, or that Ruth likes being consistently rejected by Maria. After a final confrontation, the women appear to accept their incompatibility, and their friendship becomes something more distant. But even when Ruth gets a prestigious fellowship at Bard and moves upstate with her new husband, her obsession with Maria never really disappears; it just morphs. If Ruth never stands up to Maria, it's because nothing is worth the risk of losing her. When they're teenagers, Maria asks Ruth to throw away the many portraits that Ruth painted of her; Ruth complies. 'I had a hard time forgiving her for that,' Ruth reflects, though she never tells that to Maria. Decades later, in New York, Maria uses footage of Ruth in a video without asking her permission. Watching herself on-screen, Ruth is unable to 'shake the feeling that there was a violent thrust to the video and that something had been done to me that I hadn't asked for.' Yet when Maria asks her what she thinks, Ruth demurs, telling Maria the piece is 'cool.' 'I would have been content spending the rest of my life walking behind her,' she thinks, as the two women cross the gallery back to their partners. It's an insight that makes the risk of their friendship clear: For Ruth, losing her friend would mean losing herself, too.
San Francisco Chronicle
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: 'The Tilting House' is a novel about coming of age in Communist Cuba
Yuri is a 16-year-old orphan who lives simply with her religious aunt in a big, old house in Communist Cuba in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yuri's parents had named her after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin, hoping that one day she would grow up to be a famous female astronaut. Yuri now has vague hopes of being accepted into the Lenin school, Cuba's prestigious preparatory. More Information The Tilting House By Ivonne Lamazares (Counterpoint Press; 304 pages; $27) Yuri and her Aunt Ruth's quiet lives are suddenly turned upside down when an unexpected visitor from 'la Yuma' — slang for the United States — shows up at their Havana home with a camera swinging from her neck and announcing she is family. Ruth later tells Yuri that 34-year-old Mariela is her daughter, and that when Mariela was an infant she sent her to live with a family in the United States through Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. government program in which thousands of unaccompanied children were sent from Cuba to Miami in the early 1960s. 'The Tilting House,' by Miami-based writer Ivonne Lamazares and due out Tuesday, July 22, is an affecting and sometimes amusing coming-of-age novel set in a country that few have had the opportunity to visit, despite its proximity to the U.S. It's a study of hidden family secrets, the unhealed wound of losing a mother and the quest for home. Lamazares, who was born in Havana, knows her homeland well, and her book is rife with description and historic detail that only someone with first-hand knowledge could provide. Lamazares left Cuba for the United States in 1989 during a period of shortages and deprivation known as 'The Special Period in Time of Peace.' Her first novel, 'The Sugar Island,' also set in Cuba, was translated into seven languages. In 'The Tilting House,' Yuri is quickly pulled into Mariela's chaotic world and her absurd art projects, which include a tragicomic funeral for Ruth's dead dog, Lucho, in a public park using highly illegal homemade fireworks. Ruth, already viewed as suspect by the government as a member of the small Jehovah's Witnesses group, is arrested and sent to jail on unexplained charges. Mariela later tells Yuri that they aren't cousins, but sisters, and that their now-dead mother gave birth to her as a teenager. Mariela insists that their Aunt Ruth 'kidnapped' her and sent her to live in the U.S., where she was raised on a farm in Nebraska. More harebrained projects follow, and the family's tilting house finally tumbles after neighbors and acquaintances slowly chip away at the building to repurpose many of the structure's materials. Yuri later emigrates to the U.S., where she studies and starts a career that allows her to make a return visit to the island. On that trip her past becomes clearer, and she reaches something approaching closure and forgiveness.
Daily Mirror
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Eamonn Holmes' dig at Ruth Langsford with brutal soulmate comment at celeb party
Former This Morning stars, Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford, sent shockwaves through the showbiz world when they announced they were heading for divorce last year Eamonn Holmes has made a jaw-dropping dig at his ex-wife, Ruth Langsford, after reportedly claiming that his girlfriend, Katie Alexander, 43, is his "soulmate". Ruth and Eamonn, both 65, sent shockwaves through the showbiz world when they announced they were heading for divorce last year. The former This Morning stars were thought to have one of the strongest marriages in the industry. However, after calling it quits, Eamonn moved on with relationship councillor, Katie - who he subsequently took to the party island of Ibiza - while Ruth stayed silent. Eamonn and Katie look very loved-up in recent snaps, having attended GB News star Nana Akua's engagement party earlier this month. According to Bella magazine, dad-of-four, Eamonn, gushed that Katie was his "soulmate" at the glamorous bash in London while also reportedly quipping: "In sickness you find out who is there for you." Commenting on the apparent dig, a source said: "It was an insensitive comment from Eamonn, but he's smitten with Katie and does feel like she has been there for him through the hard times. That said, it is a kick in the teeth for Ruth because she has been there for him since the beginning." Now, often seen in a wheelchair due to his chronic health problems after having a double hip replacement and spinal surgery, Eamonn is said to be leaning on Katie, quite literally. And there seems to be 'no turning back' for the star's ex, who was spotted without her wedding ring for the first time in more than a year after the split. The Loose Women veteran announced her shock break-up with her husband of 14 years last May, and a source told OK! that ditching the ring after so long was a significant move on Ruth's part. The source close to Ruth said: 'Removing that ring might have been a shock to fans, after she's worn it for so long. But it was the final bit of closure. It was a message to Eamonn and symbolic that Ruth's marriage and that chapter of her life is over. She's closing the door on her past for good. Taking it off is Ruth saying, 'I've moved on, it's all behind me.' She's just desperate to get this divorce out of the way, now. There's no turning back.' Keen cook Ruth, who shares son Jack, 23, with her Belfast-born ex posted an Instagram video recently which showed her happily prepping one of her 'favourite summer dishes' – a 'colourful, no-cook salad'. It's not the first time the seasoned star – who is now locked in a divorce battle with GB News presenter, Eamonn – has shared her culinary exploits on social media, but it's the first time she's done so having quietly removed the wedding ring on her left hand.
San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Book Review: 'The Tilting House' is a novel about coming of age in Communist Cuba
Yuri is a 16-year-old orphan who lives simply with her religious aunt in a big, old house in Communist Cuba in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yuri's parents had named her after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin, hoping that one day she would grow up to be a famous female astronaut. Yuri now has vague hopes of being accepted into the Lenin school, Cuba's prestigious preparatory. Yuri and her Aunt Ruth's quiet lives are suddenly turned upside down when an unexpected visitor from 'la Yuma' — slang for the United States — shows up at their Havana home with a camera swinging from her neck and announcing she is family. Ruth later tells Yuri that 34-year-old Mariela is her daughter, and that when Mariela was an infant she sent her to live with a family in the United States through Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. government program in which thousands of unaccompanied children were sent from Cuba to Miami in the early 1960s. 'The Tilting House,' by Miami-based writer Ivonne Lamazares, is an affecting and sometimes amusing coming-of-age novel set in a country that few have had the opportunity to visit, despite its proximity to the U.S. It's a study of hidden family secrets, the unhealed wound of losing a mother and the quest for home. Lamazares, who was born in Havana, knows her homeland well, and her book is rife with description and historic detail that only someone with first-hand knowledge could provide. Lamazares left Cuba for the United States in 1989 during a period of shortages and deprivation known as 'The Special Period in Time of Peace.' Her first novel, 'The Sugar Island,' also set in Cuba, was translated into seven languages. In 'The Tilting House,' Yuri is quickly pulled into Mariela's chaotic world and her absurd art projects, which include a tragicomic funeral for Ruth's dead dog, Lucho, in a public park using highly illegal homemade fireworks. Ruth, already viewed as suspect by the government as a member of the small Jehovah's Witnesses group, is arrested and sent to jail on unexplained charges. Mariela later tells Yuri that they aren't cousins, but sisters, and that their now-dead mother gave birth to her as a teenager. Mariela insists that their Aunt Ruth 'kidnapped' her and sent her to live in the U.S., where she was raised on a farm in Nebraska. More harebrained projects follow, and the family's tilting house finally tumbles after neighbors and acquaintances slowly chip away at the building to repurpose many of the structure's materials. Yuri later emigrates to the U.S., where she studies and starts a career that allows her to make a return visit to the island. On that trip her past becomes clearer, and she reaches something approaching closure and forgiveness. ___
