Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.
A Memoir
Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered.
Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught.
Ten years later, Wills sustains close ties with…
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.
Everything and Nothing At All
Jenny Heijun Wills