Everything Changes Everything

Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk

A resonant and timely story about love, loss, and forging a path forward in the aftermath of grief.

After tragedy upended the contours of her life, Lauren Kessler, an unflinching immersion journalist, felt compelled to move—to do something, to be somewhere else. So she set out alone on the famed Camino de Santiago, walking across Spain to create space between the life she’d lived and the life she hadn’t chosen but now inhabited.

Raw and luminous, Everything Changes Everything is a story about facing what we’d rather avoid, about the wounds we carry, hide, and—sometimes—heal. It’s about the privilege of choosing hardship, the grace of temporary friendship, the solace of kindred spirits, and the power of movement to unstick what’s stuck. It’s also about unfounded optimism, unlikely laughter, and the way grief and beauty can coexist in a single step.

POWERFUL AND MOVING

Lauren is one of my new favorite writers. I’ve read a few of her other books, but this one goes deep, into the pain, the hope, and into the acceptance of what is. Because I am a woman who has recovered from the addiction of meth, it hit me even deeper. The struggles that go with that merry go round, and the deep sorrow of loosing those you love. This book is RAW and REAL. I recommend it to everyone !

An emotional masterpiece

Sometimes life gets in the way! Without my commitments and responsibilities, I would have listened to this book for a continuous eight hours and 40 minutes without sleep, food or any other interruptions. I trudged through my other activities, only thinking about when I could return to my listening chair and continue the journey beside Lauren. When I was six hours into the book, I realized that I couldn’t bear for it to end. I have read or listened all of Lauren’s previous books, but this book resonated with me. I listened to many parts of the book with tears running down my cheeks. I wanted to be there for her and regretted that I could not give her a big hug. I learned about bravery, compassion, instinct, determination, and many other attributes too numerous to mention. There was not a lot of fluff. Every word written was completely necessary, well chosen, and vital to the story lines. If an interruption caused me to miss a sentence, I felt compelled to back up the book and re-listen to that section. Kudos to Lauren for honoring the lives of Tom and Lizzy in this memoir masterpiece.