Everything and Nothing at All: Essays

From Hilary Weston Prize-winning author Jenny Heijun Wills comes a new collection of piercing, breathtaking essays on beauty, identity, and language—as well as the grey zones that exist between and beyond these notions of self.

As a transnational adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the spaces of race and ethnicity. As a pan-polyam individual, she occupies a liminality between family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community;" heteronormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. As a person who self-harms to cope with mental illness, she moves between the desire to be beautiful and the urge to make herself ugly, longing for visibility while daily wishing her body would disappear. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, her love language is to feed, but she finds it near-impossible to consume anything herself. These facets of Jenny’s personhood have served as both the anchors she has clung to, in the time before self-discovery and understanding, and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be.

Everything and Nothing At All weaves together literary criticism, cultural context, and personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. Yet Jenny is acutely aware of the cost of this knowledge: the more she uncovers, the more parts of herself she must reconcile. And though she is guided by those who came before—her Korean grandmother, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, even Emily Brontë, when read with intention—and the loves she has sewn into her life, they cannot shield her from the combined weight of this knowledge. It feels at once like everything she has been seeking in order to set herself free, and that which threatens to extinguish her, one day, into nothing at all. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Jenny’s life, where she lingers always at the intersections and edges of identity.