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.
Autobiography without an inciting incident or outlandish background can be a tricky sell. Yet even as O’Neill struggles to justify her sudden obsession, she writes with convincing and passionate introspection ... The caper-forward passages are interspersed with bouts of self-reflection and stewing ... Meanwhile, a smattering of fundamental narrative questions go unanswered, which can lead to a corrosion of the page-turning process ... Still, Woman of Interest contains shining moments.
O’Neill elevates the subgenre, producing a memoir that is simultaneously an investigation, a noir with a femme fatale, and a darkly humorous tale of what happens when one meets the person who has everything and nothing to do with one’s life. Woman of Interest is searching, yes, but more attuned to language and paranoia than others of its genre ... Although O’Neill’s memoir is essentially concerned with her mother in Korea, the titular woman of interest, we also get a sense of the other mother in a gorgeously melancholic recounting of O’Neill’s upbringing by her adoptive family in New England ... Instead of the reparative gestures of a traditional adoptee memoir, Woman of Interest offers something darker, colder, more fraught, and ultimately, singular and transcendent.
Her memoir at times reads like a thriller and does so right at the beginning ... O’Neill captures in her writing the complexities of family and the pain caused by separation and by keeping secrets.
