Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk

by Lauren Kessler

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel

Audible Audio

Published February 24, 2026

About the author

Lauren Kessler is an award-winning author and immersion reporter who combines lively narrative with deep research to explore everything from the gritty world of a maximum security prison to the grueling world of professional ballet; from the wild, wild west of the anti-aging movement to the hidden world of Alzheimer’s sufferers; from the stormy seas of the mother-daughter relationship to the full court press of women’s basketball. She is the author of 12 works of narrative nonfiction, including Pacific Northwest Book Award winner Dancing with Rose, Washington Post bestseller Clever Girl and Los Angeles Times bestseller The Happy Bottom Riding. She is also the author of Oregon Book Award winner Stubborn Twig, which was chosen as the book for all Oregon to read in honor of the states 2009 sesquicentennial.

Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, O magazine, Utne Reader, The Nation, newsweek.com and salon.com. Club www.laurenkessler.com

Reviews

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Kessler set out on the Camino de Santiago, she was navigating grief, and she needed to take that grief somewhere. Call it a reason or a purpose or a call.

This, also, is a lesson of the Camino that translates directly to life: that occasionally and gloriously, there are true aha moments, but mostly there is the long slow toward making sense of who you are. (loc. 1762*)

I came into this have read 1) nearly every memoir about the Camino that I've been able to get my hands on and 2) two of Kessler's previous books, one of which I loved and one of which I loved less. The combination seemed like pretty good odds, to be honest, and—as it happened—the odds made good.

There's a lot here: Kessler weaves between the now and then, between her journey on the Camino and all the things that came before. She's slow to share the details of that Before, so I won't spoil anything (the shape of it becomes clearer and clearer as the story goes on, but, you know...in its own time), but suffice it to say that the details are a doozy.

One of the things I love so much about Camino memoirs is that although the path may be the same—there are multiple Camino routes,** but the Francés is the most heavily traversed, and even on other routes the basic idea is the same—each person's journey is different. Walking through restlessness or grief or change; walking with months and months of preparation or only the barest of knowledge; staying in cheap municipal lodging with fifty bunks to a room or in boutique hotels with crisp sheets and hot showers; processing big things or simply having an adventure. Maybe this is what I love so much about memoir in general.

Kessler makes excellent work of telling a complicated, messy story with very little judgement or shame. Parts of the story are quite dramatic, and it works in the book's favor that Kessler stays steady throughout, drawing on journalistic skills to tell the story without letting emotion (and to be clear: very valid emotion) take over. I wouldn't recommend this as the only Camino book you read, but down the line or as something to read when thinking about grief? Yes.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

**And judging by Kessler's social media, the Francés is not the last one she walked

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

[Corky · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 and daughter into a deeply thoughtful and cohesive memoir.

As in life, there was no perfect ending but instead a series of realizations that made this a rewarding (and devastatingly sad) read. As a fan of trail memoirs and elegies, this was distinctively captivating - a must read.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve run out of fingers to count all the friends and acquaintances who over the last decade have hiked portions of the Camino de Santiago in and around Spain. Everyone who does so has their own reason for taking on this daunting trek.
Lauren Kessler had two.
She hiked the 500-mile Camino Frances portion of the trail in the fall of 2022. One day on the trail marked the one-year anniversary of the death of her husband, Tom Hager, who had opted for death-with-dignity medicines in the face of terminal cancer. Just one day previous on the trail, Kessler received an email containing the official autopsy for her daughter Lizzie, who had died 16 weeks previous from a drug overdose.
In the face of staggering grief, Kessler felt she needed to do something radical with her life. So she became a Camino pilgrim, walking 20 miles or more each day, with a full backpack and uncertain lodging arrangements, in a foreign land, often over brutal terrain and in brutal weather.
“The Camino is about cultivating the ability to move from one unknown to another,” she writes in “Everything Changes Everything,” her new, breathtaking memoir. “I think about this a lot. I am moving from wife to widow, from mother of three to mother of two. Or maybe I am just moving."
Kessler writes as a wife, mother, memoirist, journalist, truth-teller. She plumbs marriage, parenting, addiction, domestic violence. Some of the passages in her book — about the day she watched her husband die, the day she learned of her daughter’s death — are wrenching.
On a lighter note: I have done some long-distance hikes in the UK and Ireland in recent years, nothing as demanding as the Camino, and several of Kessler’s observations about life on the trail prompted smiles of recognition: the unmitigated joy in spotting the next signpost that assures you in fact are not lost, or the on-again/off-again/on-again pattern involving rain gear in weather that can’t make up its mind.
Also, the qualities of new friends made on the trail, each bringing their own brand of “quirkiness, compassion, humility, humor.”
When I first moved to Eugene in 1985, Kessler was already something of a local literary legend, the formidable journalism professor at the University of Oregon helping to forge a new genre of writing known as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction.
Before long, she was being described as an “immersive journalist” — someone who would embed with a ballet company, or among gym rats, middle-school students or university basketball players to better understand their worlds in order to better write about them. I’ve long regarded her as the Georgina Plimpton of journalism.
Even so, I wasn’t fully prepared for the honesty and emotional power of her newest work, which, in my view, is her best yet. Five stars.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished reading “Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss and a Really Long Walk.” An odd title, at first glance. But it turns out to be exactly right.

The “really long walk” that Kessler documents is her journey along the Camino Francés, the ancient 500-mile pilgrimage that begins in the south of France, crosses northern Spain, and concludes at Santiago de Compostela, a famed Roman Catholic cathedral. The “love and loss” in the title refer to the twin deaths of her husband Tom, to cancer, and eight months later, her daughter Lizzie, to a drug overdose.

After these earth-shaking tragedies, she writes that she desired “a solitary, immersive adventure, a physical, logistical, emotional challenge that would catapult me out of my life.” Prior to this, she had little familiarity with the Camino. She did almost no research about its history or even about how to navigate it. She notes, somewhat wryly, that she had not seen Martin Sheen’s 2010 film “The Way,” a story about this very journey that nearly everyone she met along the path seemed to know well.

The book is organized in a way that draws the reader in completely, or at least that is how it worked for me. Alternating chapters follow the chronological progress of her walk, interspersed with non-time-linear accounts of the lives and deaths of her husband and daughter. Early on we learn that her husband’s torturous path through cancer led him to make use of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.

Kessler frames this work as a memoir, and it is that. But as I read, I could not help but experience it as something akin to a form of ethnography, an inquiry not only into a journey across a physical landscape, but into the social and emotional terrain of grief. What emerges is a set of richly detailed first-person narratives, both of the walk itself and of the intimate, difficult terrain of illness, addiction, dying and loss. She observes not only the world around her but also her own responses, often with a level of candor that does not always place her in the most favorable light.

One passage in particular stayed with me. She describes her reactions to those around her who attempted to express sympathy and support. She found herself recoiling from what she calls the performative nature of phrases like “sorry for your loss.” The observation is drawn from an earlier blog post of hers titled “Performative Condolence.”

I found myself sitting with that idea for a while. Not because I agreed with it entirely, but because I recognized something in it. Grief unsettles not only the person who carries it, but also those who try to approach it. We reach for familiar words, knowing even as we speak them that they will fall short. Yet we say them anyway, because silence feels worse.

Kessler does not offer a tidy resolution to that discomfort. What she offers instead is something more useful: a sustained, honest account of what it is like to keep moving forward when the life you knew has been irrevocably altered. The walk becomes less a quest for answers than a way of continuing.

In that sense, the title is not strange at all. Everything changes. And then, somehow, of course, everything continues.

[Georgette Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book as a reader who loves memoir. I left it as someone who had been quietly undone — and then, somehow, put back together just enough to keep going.
Everything Changes Everything is Lauren Kessler at her most exposed. This is not the immersion journalist reporting on someone else's world. This is the woman herself, standing in the wreckage of her own life, asking whether words — her most faithful tool — can possibly hold what she has been handed.
They can. And they do.
In the span of a heartbreakingly short stretch of time, Lauren loses two of the people she loves most. Her husband Tom, a writer and her partner of decades, chooses to legally end his life as terminal cancer takes hold — a death that is planned, witnessed, and chosen with full intention. And then Lizzie, her daughter, dies of a drug overdose. One loss carefully anticipated. One arriving like a thunderclap. Both devastating. Both full of love.
What Lauren does next is what this book is really about. She walks. Five hundred miles across northern Spain on the ancient Camino de Santiago — not to escape, but to metabolize. To create space between the life she had lived and the life she now had to inhabit. The trail becomes a character in its own right — ancient, indifferent, generous, and quietly transformative.
What I love most about Kessler as a writer is that she refuses sentiment without substance. She earns every moment of beauty by walking straight through the dark first. The grief here is specific and honest — she doesn't generalize it into something palatable. She lets it be what it is: complicated, contradictory, sometimes ugly, sometimes transcendent.
The structural choice to interweave the Camino journey with the backstory of her losses is masterful. You feel the rhythm of walking in the prose itself — one step, then another, then another — even when the heart is breaking.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing someone to addiction — one layered with stigma, with unanswerable questions, with guilt that has no logical home. Kessler writes about that grief with a courage and clarity that I imagine will be a lifeline to anyone who has carried that particular weight alone.
And there is a particular kind of grief that comes with loving someone through a chosen death — being present for a departure that is both an act of love and an act of loss simultaneously. She writes about that too, without flinching, without editorializing. She simply bears witness.
By the end, I didn't feel that Lauren had healed so much as she had learned to walk alongside what she carries. Which may be the most honest thing any book about grief can offer.
This is not a book for readers looking for resolution. It is a book for anyone brave enough to sit with truth, and trust that beauty can grow right up through the middle of it.
One of the most important memoirs I've read in years. Five stars without hesitation.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lauren Kessler’s “Everything Changes Everything” is so full of heart you can almost feel the pages pulsing beneath your fingers. Her 500-mile Camino Frances trek serves as both structure and metaphor. As she walks, sweats and ruminates, we are witness to three heart shredding journeys: her husband Tom’s cancer diagnosis and the decisions he makes in the wake of it; her daughter Lizzy’s descent into addiction and an abusive relationship; and the shattering loss of her husband (expected) and daughter (a shock) within months of each other.
Kessler’s trek is demanding and relentless, as is her grief. Rain pours down, wind whips the clouds, gray skies abound. There is no changing the past and no going back. She can only go forward, even when the next step feels too painful, too impossible to even imagine.
As she walks, Kessler subjects herself to pitiless self-examination. Grief has exposed her anger, doubts about her parenting, the shadows in her marriage. For years she survived by projecting an aura of invulnerability but now finds that façade has grown transparent as old skin. Without it, who will she be?
Day by day, the Camino erodes her edges and pulls her into the present. A stranger gives her a piece of sheepskin to soften the chafing from a backpack strap. She gets lost and re-finds her way. She meets a pilgrim soulmate. A bronzed Frenchman helps her reunite with her misplaced backpack. Café con leche sustains her; red wine mellows her, turning strangers into friends.
Like a true master, the Camino doesn’t judge, it teaches. Its lessons are quiet, yet apt. The Camino provides. Everything weighs something. You don’t have to process everything all at once…you can lighten the load one four-ounce orange at a time.
Still, there are long hours of walking, thirsting, and wrangling with grief that rises and ebbs like ocean swells. On the Camino, she writes, “occasionally and gloriously there are true aha moments, but mostly there is the long slog toward making sense of who you are.”
Most of us have or will experience a long slog to new selfhood after a life-changing event, if not on the Camino then via a different route. Kessler shows us how to face it with courage, self-compassion and piercing honesty. To re-arrange another reviewer’s comment, this brave, beautiful memoir broke my heart and lifted me up.

[Candice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down, even as it caused me great discomfort and familiarity. She's an accessible writer, with honesty and revelation, wisdom and vulnerabilty. She was once my professor at U of Oregon and still lives probably close to my son, so there were a lot of contact points I could personaly relate to along with the subject which made the memoir even more intimate. I made many notations in the book, one of the first when she is delineating the contrasts in her personality and she ends with " I want to be loved and left alone," and this was the tag line of a Peanuts cartoon from decades ago which I cut out and have saved as my own true but conflicted approach to life. There was much about Kessler I felt I understood.
Her husband of decades dies of cancer and chooses to end his life, and her young daughter dies of an OD shortly thereafter. Her sense of healing or clarification, wisdom or distraction, acceptance or evolution is to make the pilgrimage of Spain's Santiago de Compostela (although she does reference the film "The Way"). She describes the physicality of the walk and how she thinks interspersed with the details of the triggering events, her family and herself. She does this commandingly by keeping you on edge to find out what happens next. It's hardly a thriller, but there is a great deal of tension throughout. She narrates a terrifyingly accurate explanation of how a sane person sinks into addiction, and the pain of the mystification of this descent into hell and the agony of loss. How your precious daughter is no longer the same person. How you feel like you stand at the edge of the ocean watching her drown because you have no arms to save her.
As Kessler says, grief is not a process, it's an entity. She travels this road without being maudlin or dramatic, she just wants some clarification that the loss of loved ones can never provide. But her own process is true and intelligent and ultimately this hearbreaking memoir is resolute and hopeful.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

. 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 happened since then is an understatement. Everything Changes Everything is a memoir wrapped in a five hundred-mile pilgrimage on Spain’s Camino Frances. As she walks up and down hills, through deserts, vineyards, villages, and cities, she recounts the events that led her to seek a big adventure to divide the life she knew from the life ahead. These include the deaths of her husband Tom and daughter Lizzie. This book is heartbreaking, triggering for me and others who have suffered great losses, and yet so, so beautiful. This is the clearest, most realistic account of walking the camino that I have read. It makes me want to go there, too, but I have neither the physical ability nor courage that she shows every step of the way. It raises many important issues that I can’t mention without giving the story away. Take care of your heart while reading this one.

[Jen Juenke · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are expecting a dry, dusty book about walking the Camino Trail....look elsewhere.

This book was raw, emotional, and observant on someone deals with grief. WIth walking the Camino Trail thrown in.

I loved that it wasn't straightforward, it wasn't a spiritual journey that people purport to have while walking the trail. It was more about this is real, this is raw, this is the author coming to terms with her grief, her life, her future.

The reader can feel the trail, the backpack gouging into her collarbone, the rain, the poncho, the smell of diesel fumes, the rooms to stay in, the cafe con leche.

The reader can also feel the despair, the grief, the desire to find a new place in the world without her husband and child.

This book is exquisitely written, raw in feelings, and yet reserved the reader won't know everything about the lives of her husband and daughter.

This book is for everyone who wants a raw account of walking the Camino Trail, of walking with grief.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for this honest review.

[Jessica Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think maybe I wanted to read this because it’s partially about walking the Camino de Santiago and one of my besties did a good chunk of that multi-day trek pregnant. But woof- most of the book is gut-wrenching grief. Not only did Kessler’s husband die from cancer, just like mine did, but her daughter died soon after as well. I am still very triggered by cancer and the author describes her husband’s suffering in detail. I think most people could probably read this and be okay but I was light-headed and nauseated. I almost quit reading it, but I am too dang committed to reviewing the books I receive! The story of Lauren’s daughter was so upsetting too. It feels like when an abusive man gets a woman in his clutches, nothing can stop him from destroying her. On the positive side, I appreciated how the author used psychology to help me understand how I’ve dealt with my husband’s death. Thank you for the gifted copy, Grand Central Pub.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kessler sets off to walk the Camino Frances, a 500 mile route of the Camino de Santigo after experiencing immense loss. She says she needed "to do something to separate the life [she'd] been living from the life that is now in front of [her] . . . And it needed to be something big."
This walk gave her time to take solitary, physical, and emotional pilgrimage to sift through her feelings and decide what comes next.
Along the way she faces "typical" Camino challenges of taking care of basic necessities like finding lodging, laundry, navigation, and inclement weather. And she meets several interesting "characters" along the route and makes a lifelong friend.
As she walks either alone or with companions, she muses on her life as she's known it and what will serve her going forward.
Interspersed with the walking, the author reveals the tragedies in her life that have brought her to Spain to do this moving meditation.
I really enjoyed Kessler's prose and while her rationale for walking was rooted in loss, several nuggets can apply to anyone at a crossroads in life. Anyone wondering, "what's next?"
I would recommend this memoir to readers interested in the Camino experience, but also to readers who need a companion through grief. Walking with Kessler could be a therapeutic walk with someone who understands the journey though it.
Thank you to Grand Central Publishing for this sneak peek at a very moving story.

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 month in Spain, to help her deal with her loss. This was a good read.

[Kristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Join Lauren on her walk. Stay for the gut wrenching story of her losses and how the Camino helps her begin to navigate her own path forward. This book will not only take you on the adventure of the Camino, but may help you in accepting loss and reinforcing that we all need to cherish the people in our lives.

[Amy Urban · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading Camino books. Often, however, the people who have had big camino experiences aren't particularly good writers. Or, while the experience may have been transformational to them, it doesn't really warrant a book for public consumption. This book spectacularly avoids both of those pitfalls. She has a big story worth sharing and she expresses it wonderfully. Loved it.

[booksbikesbooze · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely beautiful, deep, and raw memoir.

Thank you to the publisher for my early gifted copy & to the author for sharing her story.

[Vjera · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many feelings that I can identify with. Life is complicated. I appreciated getting to travel alongside her journey.