Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts

In Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Michelle (Mickey) is the girl who never quite fits, who never finds the thing that makes her heart soar – until the day she discovers running. It becomes an obsessive focus – an escape from her everyday reality and a fractured family left adrift by her dad Teddy, who has left to start a new family.

Mickey, the underachiever, labelled lazy by an absent yet controlling Teddy, is now destined for running greatness, setting her sights on winning the nationals. Emboldened by the physicality of running, the power it brings to her body and the exhilaration, it becomes the ultimate vessel by which she can achieve: one that will test her in ways she could never imagine. Her mother Bonnie, at first unsure whether to support her daughter’s new passion, spurs her on with a new pair of shoes.

Running for her life, running for her everything, Mickey sinks into the depths of a gruelling training schedule that leaves her on the brink of starvation and at the mercy of a lecherous coach.

Josie Shapiro writes quickly, boldly conveying the visceral energy that running entails, capturing the blood, sweat, and tears, the sheer commitment and the mental exhaustion, the “gritty residue of pain” that storms through a runner’s “entire body, where nothing felt clean or in its proper place”.

At times, Mickey finds herself flying high, her body transversing the air, all light and lithe and powerful. Here, everything is beautiful. At other times, her rail-thin sinewed body rallies against itself, pushed