Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related

• Memoir: Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related (2019)
• Essay Collection: Everything and Nothing At All (2024)

---

• After being adopted to Canada as an infant, Jenny Heijun Wills returned to Korea as an adult, a journey that deeply informed her trajectory as a scholar at the University of Winnipeg and an acclaimed voice in Canadian literature.
• Written through the lens of navigating profound loss and reuniting with her biological family, her work invites readers to reconsider conventional definitions of family, kinship, and belonging.
• By claiming some of Canada’s highest literary honors in nonfiction, Wills’s work brings the complex, lived experiences of the transnational diaspora into sharp, celebrated focus.

For those navigating life across borders and cultures, "identity" can often feel like an intricate, lifetime puzzle. In particular, the life and work of author Jenny Heijun Wills—who was born in Korea and adopted into a white Canadian family—articulates the nuances of cultural disconnection and alienation with striking clarity and poetic precision. Currently a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg and a celebrated voice in Canadian letters—having been a winner and a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction—Wills offers a profound point of connection for readers who see their own fragmented experiences reflected in her prose.

Rather than turning away from the complexities of a divided life, she pieces those shards together, transforming vulnerability into powerful literary art. Through her landmark memoir, Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related (2019), and her recent essay collection, Everything and Nothing At All (2024), we can explore how shared wounds can be reshaped into sources of community resonance and insight.

The first book to establish her distinct voice was her 2019 memoir, Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. The text chronicles the four months the author spent in Seoul just before turning thirty, reuniting with her biological mother, father, and siblings. The literary community responded immediately to its depth; The Globe and Mail selected it as one of the "100 Books that Shaped 2019," and the CBC named it among the year's best nonfiction. The jury for the Hilary Weston Prize praised the work as "finely observed, candid, and a growth toward deep understanding."

In the book, Wills unfolds the process of navigating this reunion through non-linear vignettes and letters addressed to her own "older sister." The grief explored here is multi-layered. From the racial isolation of growing up in a small Canadian town to the vulnerability of an eating disorder and the precarity encountered in an adoptee guesthouse, she maps her pain without reservation.

Yet, the core of the book lies in its remarkable capacity for resilience. Her reunion ripples outward, prompting unexpected reconciliations within her birth family, and eventually leading to her younger sister joining her in Canada years later. The memoir is deeply moving because it refuses simple answers, showing instead how the legacy of adoption intersects with gender, race, and class, while proving how invaluable the hard work of forgiveness can be.

Five years later, Wills expanded on these themes with Everything and Nothing At All, a collection of essays offering even broader cultural reflections. A finalist for the 2024 Hilary Weston Prize, the book solidifies her place as an essential contemporary intellectual. Author Joshua Whitehead called the collection "an essential intellectual document," while Mattea Roach praised it as "an unparalleled expression of the international adoptee experience."

In these essays, Wills examines the intersections of her multiple identities as an international adoptee, a queer individual, and a parent. The title itself captures the central ambiguity of the adoptee experience—that precarious boundary where stories of family, bloodlines, and origins can feel like absolutely everything in one moment, and entirely weightless in the next.

She brilliantly analyzes her personal history, interpreting her past struggles with an eating disorder as a collision between the cultural love language of feeding others and a desire to make her own body disappear, effectively elevating personal narrative into the realm of sharp cultural criticism. Invoking her Korean grandmother alongside literary pioneers like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Emily Brontë, Wills weaves a fractured self into a cohesive, expansive tapestry.

The resonance these two books offer to the broader immigrant and diaspora community is significant. While Wills writes from the specific, distinct perspective of an international adoptee, the foundational themes she wrestles with—the longing for belonging, the navigation of cultural loss, and the weight of generational sacrifices—are deeply familiar to anyone who has crossed an ocean to make a home. Holding a PhD in English literature from Wilfrid Laurier University, her position as an academic and writer ensures that these transitioned, complex diasporic narratives are given serious intellectual space in the literary landscape.

In particular, the "disconnect between the private and public self" she confesses to in her essays reflects a performance many recognize in daily life—the balancing act of moving smoothly through civic life while privately holding onto distant cultural roots. Wills does not hide this disconnect. Instead, she finds creative and intellectual vitality within those gaps and ambiguities. Her writing suggests that the state of straddling two worlds can actually become a vital lens, allowing us to see the world with greater breadth and empathy. Her voice is vital because she does not merely recount a painful story; she uses it to expand the universal definitions of kinship.

Ultimately, Jenny Heijun Wills’s achievements matter because they demonstrate the power of reclaiming one's narrative. Her books demonstrate that the emotional and cultural complexities of diaspora identity are not deficits, but rich, vital assets that deepen the cultural fabric of society as a whole.

The ongoing journey shown in Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related—maintaining ties across languages and continents for over a decade—offers a sense of solidarity to readers navigating their own fractured histories. Furthermore, the fearless insight of Everything and Nothing At All serves as a meaningful guidepost for the next generation. As the author notes, "Even if our roots look like a performance, there is undeniably something real within them." Through her continued engagement with the adoptee community and her advocacy for marginalized voices, Wills provides a clear template for how to live authentically on the margins.

Her work reminds us that we can transform the challenges of displacement into beautiful, unique patterns of resilience. For readers balancing multiple heritages, her writing offers both comfort and a profound intellectual challenge. As her title suggests, while the forces of displacement can sometimes make an individual feel like "nothing at all," the act of reclaiming one's story has the power to mean everything.