Woman of Interest : A Memoir

A National Book Foundations 5 Under 35 honoreedelivers 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 ONeill 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 shed never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea.

After contacting a grizzled private investigator, ONeill 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 discoverthe possibility that her biological mother was her kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her ownwas 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. ONeill 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.