Woman of Interest: A Memoir

by Tracy O'Neill

Overview

MOST ANTICIPATED READ and MUST READ OF 2024: The Millions, LitHub, Esquire, BookRiot, Bustle, Vulture, Boston Globe, Brit & Co, Southern Living

“Woman of Interest is a memoir wrapped in a mystery—an inward examination of family, identity, and self, but also an actual gumshoe detective story. Each extraordinary, prickly sentence is conjured with clarity and conflict. Funny, moving, mean—an exceptional book from an extraordinary writer.” —Kevin Nguyen, author of New Waves

“Dark, deeply funny. . . . Dashiell Hammett meets Fleabag.”—The New Yorker

A National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honoree delivers her first work of nonfiction: a compulsively readable, genre-bending story of finding her missing birth mother and, along the way, learning the priceless power of self-knowledge.

In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea.

After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart when he disappeared before the job was done, picking up the trail of clues and becoming her own hell-bent detective. Despite COVID-19, the promise of what she might discover—the possibility that her biological mother was her kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own—was too tempting.

Written like a mystery novel, Woman of Interest is a tale of self-discovery and fugitivity from convention that features a femme fatale of unique proportions, a former CIA operative with a criminal record, and a dogged investigator of radical connections outside the nuclear family. O’Neill gorgeously bends the detective genre to her own will as a writer, stepping out of the shadows of her own self-conception to illuminate the hopes of the woman of interest she is both chasing and becoming.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063309883
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/25/2024
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	553 KB

About the Author

Tracy O’Neill is the author of the novels The Hopeful and Quotients. She was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Narrative 30 Below finalist. She was also named a Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow. O’Neill teaches at Vassar College, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and other publications.

Editorial Reviews

2024-03-09
An account of the author’s search for her biological mother in 2020.

“I was thirty-three, adopted, Korean born, New England bred. Profession: writer. And because no one made a living writing anymore, profession: professor….I had not evaded taxes, but I had evaded children.” O’Neill clearly lays out the situation at the beginning, noting that her desire to find the woman who birthed her and gave her up is twofold. First, she writes, “my life depended on this missing person. I mean she had been one of my mothers.” Second, she sought “confirmation that I was a woman still able to write a new narrative into her life.” The two-time novelist and Vassar professor filed a missing person’s report for her biological mother. The ensuing conversations with a private investigator are entertaining. At the end of the year, O’Neill traveled alone to Korea for a few weeks to meet her mother. “I did not know what I was really doing,” she writes, “but perhaps a person of interest never did.” The narrative sometimes gets mired in the author’s self-focus, and the latter half describes meeting her mother in person. “She was there,” writes the author. “Right there. And the impression she gave was of an idling Xerox machine. To reach her seemed impossible.” The author’s details and nuanced layers of longing feel genuine, vulnerable, and vivid. Even after the end of the search, her investigation continued: “As it turns out, autobiography can’t be abandoned as easily as a bad alibi, or a child. At a certain point, the question is not, What will you do next? It is, once more, How did I do what I did?” This is not a story of redemption, but it is heartbreakingly human.

A propulsive, occasionally meandering memoir.

Kirkus Reviews