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.

Lauren Kessler is an award-winning author and (semi) fearless immersion reporter who combines lively narrative with deep research. She is the author of 11 works of narrative nonfiction, 3 biographies, an oral history, and 4 books on writing and reporting. She teaches Storytelling for Social Change at the University of Washington and runs writing workshops for Forum for Journalism and Media in Vienna, and for newbie and veteran writers closer to home. A graduate of Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, she holds a Ph.D. in Communications from the University of Washington. She lives in Oregon.