WOMAN OF INTEREST: A Memoir, by Tracy O’Neill
Four years ago, the novelist Tracy O’Neill was languishing in her Brooklyn apartment, fresh out of a long-term relationship, when she got to thinking about her birth mother in South Korea, whom she’d never known. City life was a morass of P.C.R. tests and Zoom classes — O’Neill is an assistant professor at Vassar College — and she became fixated on the idea of a mother “who, if not dead, could be dying alone.”
Raised in New England, O’Neill had never given much thought to the circumstances behind her adoption and knew little beyond a cache of documents from when she was an infant at a Korean orphanage. Seon Ah, one filing read, using the author’s given name, “tries to hold up her head but feels uneasy.”
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. Her microscope is turned to the highest magnification, especially when it’s herself on the slide.
Initially, O’Neill does not inform her adoptive family of this hunt for a septuagenarian woman named Cho Kee Yeon. Instead, she solicits the services of a private investigator, a font of both paranoia and truth who furnishes helpful pointers like “If you were rich, you’d have figured this out already.” He tells her, essentially, to trust no one as she follows a bureaucratic trail hunting for Cho’s resident ID number, the Korean equivalent to a Social Security number, with the potential to yield an address.
During her yearlong search, O’Neill takes up with a terse Serbian boyfriend (“There are only so many words I can give and receive in a day”) and has extended interactions with lovingly painted friends. Eventually, O’Neill’s “third cousin’s father” manifests with enough information to warrant her maiden voyage to Korea, where she does not speak the language and will have to spend 10 days in quarantine meeting a family of strangers. “Even though your mom is going to welcome you,” she is warned, “your mom’s personality is not that great.”
“Woman of Interest” is written in a sporadically noir style, with sentences dressed up in trench coats: “I still didn’t have a location on her, should something go sideways.” O’Neill name-checks Raymond Chandler, though the hard-boiled moments lean more “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (“Tell them Kiara sent you,” a ride-share driver says to her) than “Killer in the Rain.”
The caper-forward passages are interspersed with bouts of self-reflection and stewing, despite O’Neill’s claim that “I did not want to endlessly rationalize, dispute, rationalize on different terms, poke holes, poke back, call into question.” Meanwhile, a smattering of fundamental narrative questions go unanswered, which can lead to a corrosion of the page-turning process. Sometimes the phrase “genre-bending” is a euphemism not for a feat but for a trial of patience.
From a certain angle, this is the point. O’Neill’s patience is also being tested. She is frustrated and confused by her biological family’s withholding and lies, mostly expressed through translation apps, and she is rigorous in her documentation of that confusion. The book is a shell game of black boxes, and O’Neill wants us to feel it, “drowning in information, drowning in misinformation.” And we do. We are in limbo with her, trapped between ignorance and truth, a sensation that will surely resonate with adoptees in particular.
The nagging issue is not stylistic (you ride the wave or you don’t) but an odd lack of foresight as to how her visit to Korea might impact those around her. These people are not strapped in for O’Neill’s mythologizing, aphorisms or analysis. “I wonder why my cousin believes I know what someone else feels,” says one family member, early on, via Google Translate. Their glee upon her arrival, their concerns that she’s not eating enough and their questions regarding marriage prospects seem like the stuff of charming comedy, until it’s gleaned and chewed over as writer’s grist. This is a story of what happened in real life. But it’s as if O’Neill sees her role from a fictional vantage, wherein a narrator is a fabricated vessel to be filled with certain traits and attitudes, the more flawed the better.
Still, “Woman of Interest” contains shining moments, such as a road trip with O’Neill’s newfound sister and the author’s distilled descriptions of childhood. “I felt a wish,” she writes of her last day in the house she grew up in, after it goes into foreclosure. “And the wish was that if a loss was coming, I could hurry up and lose this home faster.” Also, I have never read such a succinct appraisal of the motherhood debate: “I was afraid I would regret a biologically irrevocable decision, and I was afraid I would regret the other biologically irrevocable decision.”
Chandler believed that the detective story and the love story could not coexist, not happily. Respectfully, I disagree. As does O’Neill. But success depends on whom you’re looking for.
WOMAN OF INTEREST: A Memoir | By Tracy O’Neill | HarperOne | 273 pp. | $28.99
