It is rare that a book gently takes me by the hand and shows me a completely different way of thinking about the world, and about myself, but Ella's book did exactly this.
It was a tonic after the whiplash of the past few years in and out of lockdowns, hospitals, and states of panic. Nearly every page is illustrated—though illustrated is really the wrong word because if you know anything about art then you can see that every single piece was hand-painted—with something generally overlooked about our world. Combined with not a single word more than what is necessary she asks us, all of us, to contemplate why exactly it is that we have come to this state of being in our world; this state of beauty that is so unbelievably elitist and narrow.
Each sentence is articulate and ponderous and yet somehow demands nothing from you. Instead, all she asks you to do is to open your mind to her poetic depictions of what she calls "the new beauty."
Ella's new beauty is "the small, faintly spotted feathers that young birds lose," and "clouds at night, the ones that look like oil spills." It is "a fierce noticing. Much of the time you can let it be wordless but on occasional nights it will be shouting curses at the planets you cannot see."
I didn't know exactly what to expect when I picked up this book, but having been consumed by it I would describe it like this: take the breadth of a graphic novel, the depth of a manifesto, and the poetic musings on monotony of a Carol Shields, then ask them to pupate and metamorphise into a fully-formed wonder of literary and artistic power. That will get you a copy of Everything, Beautiful.
If you take the time to swim through the world Sanders has created within her paintings and words, and especially to allow yourself to think differently having climbed out on the other side of the pond, then what you will be left with is a new way of looking at the world, and hopefully a new way of looking at yourself. A new beauty—entirely.
"The new beauty, quite simply, does not make you feel terrible. It does not make you wonder whether you are enough. Instead the new beauty serves as small miracles of confirmation and clarity that you are enough, that you always were."