Award-winning memoirist Jenny Heijun Wills on maintaining privacy while life writing

For Jenny Heijun Wills, privacy is protection.

The writer strikes a delicate balance in her two books — the most recent the essay collection “Everything and Nothing At All” — sharing deeply personal facets of her life while keeping parts of herself safe, just for her.

“Despite the fact that I continue to write about my life and some of the important people in it, I’ve become even more protective of those people — and of myself in some ways, but more of other people — and so I’m quite cautious,” Wills said.

That plays out across her public presence: on social media, in the promotion she does for her work — including this interview — and in her books themselves, she said.

“I never have thought to hesitate about my own experiences, what to hold back and what to share. How I do so is different. That’s a different question,” said Wills, who teaches English at the University of Winnipeg.

“I do also manipulate craft to present things in a way that does keep certain things close to the heart and allows other things to be placed on the table.”

In “Everything and Nothing At All,” published Tuesday by Knopf Canada, she writes about her relationship to beauty, to language, to love. The book is not so much a sequel to her award-winning memoir “Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related” as a companion, she said.

Like her first book, which told the story of her complicated reunion with her family of origin, the essay collection discusses the experience of being a transnational, transracial adoptee. Wills was born in South Korea and adopted by a white family from a mostly-white part of southern Ontario.

“I think very, very carefully — and my editors are also very thoughtful about this — about the other people, the other characters that I represent in my story. I’m very, very protective, especially of youths,” Wills said.

“I’m constantly thinking about consent issues, and as with many things, I don’t believe that youths can consent to having their perspectives told in a story.”

That care is evident in “Everything and Nothing At All,” in which she writes about becoming a co-parent to three girls in a new, non-traditional form of kinship.

She is their ummah (the Korean word for mom), her husband is their appah (the Korean word for dad), and they have a mama as well, who also parents them.

Wills doesn’t share her family members’ names or the details of their arrangement, only explaining what’s necessary to make her point: that she has not adopted her children, and will not until they are 18 and can decide for themselves whether that’s something they want.

Nor does she detail how they were separated for a time.

“I worry…that one by one they might be taken away,” she writes. “It already happened once. They saw us fight. They saw us lose. Almost. They saw unspeakable meanness and dishonesty cut through political idealism and moral sanctity.”

The way she writes about her children, in particular, is designed to protect them, she said.

“I hope that they can tell through everything that I do that I’m very cautious about their privacy and protecting them, and so when it comes to writing, it would just be a natural extension of those behaviours.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 29, 2024.