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 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.

Author: Tracy O'Neill
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 06/25/2024
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 8.51h x 5.75w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9780063309869


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/2024 pg. 10
Library Journal 04/01/2024 pg. 102
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2024
Publishers Weekly 04/29/2024
Booklist 05/15/2024 pg. 3
BookPage 07/01/2024