Woman of Interest: A Memoir

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, thirtysomething, and in a world playing by new rules, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious birth mother she’d never met—may be dying somewhere in South Korea. Hiring a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart and, when he disappeared before the job was done, picked up the trail, becoming her own hell-bent detective. Covid could have already gotten to her mother. Yet the promise of whom and what she might discover—the possibility that her biological mother was her own 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, featuring 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 and fugitivity from convention. 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 hope-filled woman of interest she is becoming.