Woman of Interest : A Memoir

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 mysteryan 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, meanan 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 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.