Everything and Nothing At All: Essays

"Here is my disconnect: the private and public self. My mind and body. The real person and curated spectacle. . . . Are there actual roots with which to fasten this performance to anything real?"

As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, who self-harms to cope with mental illness, her love language is to feed, but daily she wishes her body would disappear. These facets of Wills' being have served as the anchors she once clung to and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be.

Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. And though the experiences of accumulating this knowledge have often been shot through with pain, Wills spins these threads into priceless gold—a radical, fearless vision of kinship and family. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Wills' self, transforming them into something more—something that could be everything.

JENNY HEIJUN WILLS was born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in Southern Ontario, Canada, and currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is the author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir, which received the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book. She is a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg.

ISBN: 9781039009844
Format: Hardback
Pages: 248
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: August 27, 2024

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION

“Everything and Nothing At All combines memoir and cultural analysis to weave a rich and complex tapestry of identity, belonging, and rejection in the contexts of self, family, and communities both large and small. These richly decorated and incisive essays are sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, and always rooted deeply in Wills’ lived experience, even as she finds parallels in literature and the world at large. In elegant prose, Wills fashions a searing cultural and social commentary and a moving personal journey that considers—and challenges—what it means to be seen and unseen.” —2024 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction jury (Annahid Dashtgard, Taylor Lambert and Christina Sharpe)

“What does a book look like when it subverts narrow stories of kinship and ancestry, when it refuses to pander or be pinned down and possessed, when it upends crushing dichotomies, fixed definitions, forced choices? What does a book look like when it is brave and vulnerable and knows its true worth? It looks like this. Defiantly wise. Unbeautifully beautiful. Capaciously loving. Mutinous.” —Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing

"In Everything and Nothing At All, Jenny Heijun Wills' lyrical voice rings with clarity and sparkles with intelligence. These essays demand your careful attention, shocking you out of complacency and forcing you to re-examine, to reimagine. This stunning, challenging book is nothing short of a gift." —Alicia Elliott, author of And Then She Fell

“Unforgettable—a startling and visceral read. In Everything and Nothing At All, Jenny Heijun Wills leads us through the bright, cool antechambers of her mind to dissect, via the lens of her own experience, the fundamentals of life itself. In prose that is searing, exacting and beautiful, Wills bends time to examine what it means––and how it feels––to be seen, unseen, wanted, unwanted, loved and unloved. This book is sharp and it is living, and it is an essential and urgent document in a world still very much trying to know itself.” —Claudia Dey, author of Daughter