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Everything Affects Everyone
When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene's mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way.
Everything Affects Everyone is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.
Everything Affects Everyone is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.
235 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2021
3 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
About the author
Shawna Lemay
14 books83 followers"A lamp and a flower pot in the center. The flower can always be changing." –Virginia Woolf.
The Flower Can Always Be Changing:
From the bestselling author of Rumi and the Red Handbag comes a new collection of brief essays about the intersection of poetry, painting, photography and beauty. Inspired by the words of Virginia Woolf, Lemay welcomes you into her home, her art and her life as a poet and photographer of the every day. Lemay shares visits to the museum with her daughter, the beauty in an average workday at the library, and encourages writers and readers to make an appointment with flowers, with life.
Rumi and the Red Handbag was shortlisted for the Alberta Readers Choice Award. All the God-Sized Fruit, her first book, won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Calm Things: Essays was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. She has an M.A. in English from the University of Alberta.
The Flower Can Always Be Changing:
From the bestselling author of Rumi and the Red Handbag comes a new collection of brief essays about the intersection of poetry, painting, photography and beauty. Inspired by the words of Virginia Woolf, Lemay welcomes you into her home, her art and her life as a poet and photographer of the every day. Lemay shares visits to the museum with her daughter, the beauty in an average workday at the library, and encourages writers and readers to make an appointment with flowers, with life.
Rumi and the Red Handbag was shortlisted for the Alberta Readers Choice Award. All the God-Sized Fruit, her first book, won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Calm Things: Essays was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. She has an M.A. in English from the University of Alberta.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 29, 2021
Shawna Lemay’s Everything Affects Everyone is a magical text grounded in the everyday reality of photographer, interviewer, poet, librarian, and—why not?—angels among us, one of whom may be also a thief. Lemay’s prose is captivating, sensuous, and luscious (don’t start reading without laying in stores of baked treats and whipped cream). She makes virtuoso leaps from what cannot be to what is and what we must become if we are to understand ourselves and one another at all. Readers will savour the voices and ways of being that inhabit her panorama of unforgettable characters and settings. Those new to Lemay’s work should also seek out her novel Rumi and the Red Handbag, her collection The Flower Must Always Be Changing, her essays Calm Things, and all her fine books to sink with delight and wonder into her rich pages, again and again.
February 16, 2022
Wow. I feel like such a beguiling and beautiful book needs more than just some typey typey how many stars do you give it review on goodreads, you know? Hey, I said before (in my review of this same author's novel Rumi and the Red Handbag) that angels aren't really my thing but Shawna Lemay's writing certainly is. There's a section on sadness that I was like jesus I was just thinking about this in almost these words... but her words are way better. Just read them!
September 26, 2023
A quiet and astounding book. I loved it.
Read it again and loved it more.
Read it again and loved it more.
March 23, 2023
“Reality is full of secrets that everyone knows and refuses to acknowledge,” says Xaviere in Shawna Lemay’s novel Everything Affects Everyone. At first I read the novel slowly, savouring lines like this one and copying out quotations I wanted to remember.
In an interview with Xaviere’s friend Daphne, the photographer Irene Guernsey speaks about creating art: “There is above all a sacredness in creating something from nothing.” She says, “Art, itself, can bear quite a lot, and it can be enough, or close to enough.” It can be made in “isolated spots.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be noticed. The artist has to “be able to feel, to let things in.” And yet “The world is always at odds with the artist,” and “Maybe it has to be that way.” I liked finding Rilke in this novel: “You must change your life,” he says, and the women of Everything Affects Everyone recognize that they are all engaged in a process of transformation, as they work to understand the mysteries of art.
As I say, I had been reading the novel slowly, and then, after I received news of the death of a family friend, someone I had known and loved all my life, I struggled to make sense of the shock and one of the first things I did was to curl up with Shawna’s novel and read the rest of it all at once. I suppose in a way I was trying to find out how this thing that had happened would affect all of us, everyone. Each loss is unique, of course, and yet all of us experience loss again and again, as we lose people we love, dreams we once cherished, visions of what might have been.
Reading didn’t take away the pain, though I don’t think that’s the effect I was searching for. Like Xaviere, I felt I was learning that “I’m meant to breathe and live, and beyond that, I’m meant to appreciate the beauty of things in a heightened way.” I went looking for photos of the friend we had lost, and I found one—the last photo of her that I took during what turned out to be her last visit with our family—in which she is laughing, during a conversation with one of my aunts, and I could almost hear that familiar laugh. For a moment, she was with us again.
I won’t try to summarize the plot of Shawna’s beautiful novel. Indeed, as Xaviere says, her life “is to be without plot.” Things do happen in this book: transformation—even transfiguration—and theft, and reconciliation. But the plot isn’t the main point. A photograph stolen from an exhibition in Edmonton, Alberta called Snow Angels, Forgotten Angels, and Winged Beings is linked with the artworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990. Something about the empty frames that mark the locations of the crimes prompts people to talk about other things that have been stolen or lost.
Everything Affects Everyone draws attention to “the sense that there are no endings.” Beyond the “traditional narrative arc,” says a character named Michelangelo Dupree near the end of the novel, “There is an ongoingness that I wish to capture.” And maybe that’s the word I was looking for when I was reading: ongoingness.
I often find myself quoting Aristotle, who says in the Nicomachean Ethics that “The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” I heard an echo of this idea in Xaviere’s claim that “I need to know things that I will only learn by knowing them.” Practice. Education. Creativity. All of us know secrets about loss. Sometimes we can look at them and sometimes we can’t. Even when the frame is empty, maybe we can create something from nothing. Learn something by doing it. Know something by knowing it. Learn to grieve by grieving.
(An version of this review was originally posted on my blog on March 17, 2023)
In an interview with Xaviere’s friend Daphne, the photographer Irene Guernsey speaks about creating art: “There is above all a sacredness in creating something from nothing.” She says, “Art, itself, can bear quite a lot, and it can be enough, or close to enough.” It can be made in “isolated spots.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be noticed. The artist has to “be able to feel, to let things in.” And yet “The world is always at odds with the artist,” and “Maybe it has to be that way.” I liked finding Rilke in this novel: “You must change your life,” he says, and the women of Everything Affects Everyone recognize that they are all engaged in a process of transformation, as they work to understand the mysteries of art.
As I say, I had been reading the novel slowly, and then, after I received news of the death of a family friend, someone I had known and loved all my life, I struggled to make sense of the shock and one of the first things I did was to curl up with Shawna’s novel and read the rest of it all at once. I suppose in a way I was trying to find out how this thing that had happened would affect all of us, everyone. Each loss is unique, of course, and yet all of us experience loss again and again, as we lose people we love, dreams we once cherished, visions of what might have been.
Reading didn’t take away the pain, though I don’t think that’s the effect I was searching for. Like Xaviere, I felt I was learning that “I’m meant to breathe and live, and beyond that, I’m meant to appreciate the beauty of things in a heightened way.” I went looking for photos of the friend we had lost, and I found one—the last photo of her that I took during what turned out to be her last visit with our family—in which she is laughing, during a conversation with one of my aunts, and I could almost hear that familiar laugh. For a moment, she was with us again.
I won’t try to summarize the plot of Shawna’s beautiful novel. Indeed, as Xaviere says, her life “is to be without plot.” Things do happen in this book: transformation—even transfiguration—and theft, and reconciliation. But the plot isn’t the main point. A photograph stolen from an exhibition in Edmonton, Alberta called Snow Angels, Forgotten Angels, and Winged Beings is linked with the artworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990. Something about the empty frames that mark the locations of the crimes prompts people to talk about other things that have been stolen or lost.
Everything Affects Everyone draws attention to “the sense that there are no endings.” Beyond the “traditional narrative arc,” says a character named Michelangelo Dupree near the end of the novel, “There is an ongoingness that I wish to capture.” And maybe that’s the word I was looking for when I was reading: ongoingness.
I often find myself quoting Aristotle, who says in the Nicomachean Ethics that “The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” I heard an echo of this idea in Xaviere’s claim that “I need to know things that I will only learn by knowing them.” Practice. Education. Creativity. All of us know secrets about loss. Sometimes we can look at them and sometimes we can’t. Even when the frame is empty, maybe we can create something from nothing. Learn something by doing it. Know something by knowing it. Learn to grieve by grieving.
(An version of this review was originally posted on my blog on March 17, 2023)
May 5, 2023
Shawna Lemay’s spellbinding novel Everything Affects Everyone begins with Xaviere preparing to attend her friend Daphne’s funeral. After Daphne’s sudden death, Xaviere learned that Daphne—a friend from college who remained curious throughout her brief life—has bequeathed to her a collection of cassette tapes. The tapes contain the recording of Daphne’s interview with a photographer whom Xaviere has never heard of: Irene Guernsey (also deceased). On the tapes, Irene—an artist living a reclusive life in an isolated house outside Edmonton surrounded by wilderness, who rarely exhibited her work and never gave interviews—opens up to Daphne about an unsettling, otherworldly experience. Xaviere, stunned and fascinated by a dialogue that veers in unexpected, bewildering directions, finds herself drawn to their conversation in a profound, life-altering manner as Irene describes her efforts to photograph angels’ wings. Further research into Irene Guernsey and her work compels Xaviere to move into Irene’s house, and as this portion of the novel winds down, Xaviere finds herself transformed by what she experiences. The book’s latter sections take place after the passage of 20 years. We meet Sophie Angela Duras, a scholar who also feels a connection to Irene’s work, which is still not well known but has emerged somewhat from complete obscurity. Sophie has devised a project that involves listening in on conversations among people viewing works of art. She stations herself in a room at the Art Gallery of Alberta where some of Irene’s photos are on display and writes down what she overhears. But everything changes when one of Irene’s angel photos is stolen—someone simply carries the photo in its frame out the front door. The brazen theft galvanizes public interest in the exhibit and in Irene, to the extent that Irene’s life and work come to the attention of a famous filmmaker. Further conversations between intelligent, creative women follow, driven by questions around Irene’s aesthetic methods and motivations. Suspense and tension in Lemay’s novel are not generated by the kind of event-driven narrative with which we are familiar. Rather, the impetus to keep turning pages is propelled by a relentless and sometimes playful flow of philosophical notions, theories and conjectures about what Irene was up to, and what the images themselves are telling us regarding unseen (perhaps unseeable and unknowable) aspects of our temporal existence. Everything Affects Everyone is an unexpected delight, a novel that defies many of the conventions of narrative fiction and leaves the brain humming with ideas about the nature of art, the mystery of creativity, the role of the artist in society and the need to stretch boundaries and continually challenge the status quo. Everything Affects Everyone inspires as well, by reminding us that, for many of us, art and life are intimately intertwined.
December 31, 2023
A bit pretentious, dense, overblown, & indulgent…but still sometimes beautiful, if you can manage to look past all that. At times, I managed; other times, I didn’t. Regardless, I’m glad I read this. I think it’s important to push yourself to read differently every now & again. And this, with its interview and transcription format, was different.
It’s a look at faith, grace, the divine and the mundane; an exploration of communication, loneliness, language, and art(ifice), with some missteps — and some truly transcendent sentences. Dog-eared pages adorn my copy.
It’s funny to think about how the age-old writing advice “show, don’t tell” applies and how it doesn’t apply to this work. The format of the novel seems to dictate that we, the readers, be told. For example, we are TOLD that the angel can be “earthy, “ill-mannered” & “loud” but we never experience this volubility, even through the recounting of stories & events.
This feels off because the characters have been shown their truths (it’s *about* revelation!). Irene’s angel never speaks. And a photograph is “worth” a thousand words, isn’t it? So, how do we reconcile these differences? And when, within its pages, are we shown? Because I do think it happens, occasionally.
Although I think Xaviere’s section was necessary, the writing in these chapters lacked finesse. It served as an example of how my favorite kind of writing (that which pays attention to nature and joy) can go wrong.
If you give this novel a chance, I’d advise that you don’t decide to read it as your last book of the year. It requires time and patience (for many different reasons). Despite my critiques, and though I’m likely to stay away from other novels by LeMay, I’d like to try her work in different forms: poetry, and especially her book of essays, entitled “Calm Things.” I have a feeling that I’ll really enjoy it.
It’s a look at faith, grace, the divine and the mundane; an exploration of communication, loneliness, language, and art(ifice), with some missteps — and some truly transcendent sentences. Dog-eared pages adorn my copy.
It’s funny to think about how the age-old writing advice “show, don’t tell” applies and how it doesn’t apply to this work. The format of the novel seems to dictate that we, the readers, be told. For example, we are TOLD that the angel can be “earthy, “ill-mannered” & “loud” but we never experience this volubility, even through the recounting of stories & events.
This feels off because the characters have been shown their truths (it’s *about* revelation!). Irene’s angel never speaks. And a photograph is “worth” a thousand words, isn’t it? So, how do we reconcile these differences? And when, within its pages, are we shown? Because I do think it happens, occasionally.
Although I think Xaviere’s section was necessary, the writing in these chapters lacked finesse. It served as an example of how my favorite kind of writing (that which pays attention to nature and joy) can go wrong.
If you give this novel a chance, I’d advise that you don’t decide to read it as your last book of the year. It requires time and patience (for many different reasons). Despite my critiques, and though I’m likely to stay away from other novels by LeMay, I’d like to try her work in different forms: poetry, and especially her book of essays, entitled “Calm Things.” I have a feeling that I’ll really enjoy it.
March 27, 2023
Trying to describe this book is like trying to describe an encounter with an angel. Both the book and any attempt to discuss it are a sublime impossibility. As all the best art is.
November 7, 2023
An angelic book. It gently encourages the reader to come in, settle back, and be prepared to let the story evolve at its own pace. Resistance is futile. It will charm you.
January 13, 2025
Some parts of the writing were so beautiful and precise and I feel like I would still read Lemay’s book of essays. But overall the book was drawn-out and pretentious, especially in the last chapters.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews