Everything Changes Everything, Lauren Kessler
Everything Changes Everything, Lauren Kessler
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Everything Changes Everything
Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk

Author: Lauren Kessler

Narrator: Lauren Kessler

Unabridged: 8 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Balance

Published: 02/24/2026


Synopsis

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.
 

About Lauren Kessler

Lauren Kessler is an award-winning author and semi-fearless immersion reporter who combines lively narrative with deep research. She has explored everything from the gritty world of a maximum-security prison to the grueling world of professional ballet. She is the author of ten works of narrative nonfiction, including Raising the Barre, Clever Girl, and The Happy Bottom Riding Club. Her books have been BookSense selections, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times bestsellers, Wall Street Journal and People magazine "best" selections, Pacific Northwest Book Award winners, and Oregon Book Award winners.

Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, O Magazine, salon.com, Utne Reader, the Nation, newsweek.com, Prevention, Ladies Home Journal, and elsewhere. Kessler is an international speaker and workshop leader. She founded a writers' group for inmates of a maximum-security prison, teaches storytelling for social change to nonprofits in the U.S. and abroad, and works with traditional journalists who want to hone their storytelling skills. She blogs at laurenchronicles.com about living an engaged life. She lives in Oregon.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Corky on January 04, 2026

A masterful memoir combining the classic trail tale with the grief of profound loss. Kessler, within the first few pages made it clear that she was an artist capable of balancing the monotony of walking many miles a day with gut wrenching reflections of both her love for, and loss of, her husband an......more

Goodreads review by Sue on March 02, 2026

. Lauren Kessler has long been one of my creative nonfiction heroines. We have crossed paths several times in our Oregon writer world, including a lovely evening at the Nye Beach Writers Series, where she and her teenage daughter Lizzie read portions of the book My Teenage Werewolf. To say a lot has......more

Goodreads review by Sheila on January 04, 2026

I received a free copy of, Everything Changes Everything, by Lauren Kessler, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Lauren Kessler decides to walk the Camino de Santiago, in Spain, for over a month. People deal with grief in their own ways, Lauren decide to walk for a mon......more