Woman of Interest

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.