Unveiling Hidden Truths: How Stephanie Stalvey’s "Everything in Color" Transforms the Love Story Genre
Everything in Color doesn’t do this. Stalvey’s work has an expansiveness, an integrity, that propaganda lacks. She is comfortable enough with her story to openly admit what she misses. In one scene, she and James, her husband, are cradling their newborn in the middle of the night, and she asks James if he thinks they should take the baby to church. James pulls back, wide-eyed, surprised by her question. “The good stuff,” Stalvey recalls. “It was really good, wasn’t it?” She names what she loved about church, but her fondness for the community doesn’t obscure her awareness of its harms. She holds both realities at once, not allowing either to minimize the other. “What do you do,” Stalvey asks, “when every single memory you have — the good and the bad — is connected to this one thing? Like, do you think it’s even possible to separate the good parts from the bad? Or . . . is it all too intertwined?” By fully acknowledging both the good and the bad, Stalvey has not merely swapped the values of black-and-white binary thinking; she is moving beyond it.
