Everything and Nothing At All

Essays

By: Jenny Heijun Wills

Narrated by: Jenny Heijun Wills

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2024 • CBC Books’ Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2024

“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.