Everything and Nothing at All

Essays

De: Jenny Heijun Wills

Narrado por: Jenny Heijun Wills

"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.

©2024 Jenny Heijun Wills (P)2024 Knopf Canada

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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