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4.0 

Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

By Jenny Heijun Wills
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. by Jenny Heijun Wills digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

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 her Korean family. Her Korean parents and her younger sister attended her wedding in Montreal, and that same sister now lives in Canada. Remarkably, meeting Jenny caused her birth parents to reunite after having been estranged since her adoption. Little by little, Jenny Heijun Wills is learning and relearning her stories and those of her biological kin, piecing together a fragmented life into something resembling a whole.

Delving into gender, class, racial, and ethnic complexities, as well as into the complex relationships between Korean women--sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, aunts and nieces--Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. describes in visceral, lyrical prose the painful ripple effects that follow a child's removal from a family, and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness.

63 Reviews

4.0
“I read this in the context of school so my reading was involuntary. I felt like I was being trauma-dumped and it felt exhausting.”
“Breathtaking. I am in awe of Wills's use of language. She takes unpretentious words and strings them together in lyrical sentences that arrest your heart. This was such a creative and vulnerable story to share and way of sharing it. I'm sad I borrowed it from the library so I couldn't underline and keep.”

About Jenny Heijun Wills

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.

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