Tracy O’Neill’s Woman of Interest is a quest memoir: a voyage there and back, out and in. The book recounts the author’s search for her birth mother during the frightening heights of covid, “a pandemic that had miniaturized life.” Enlisting the help of a PI named Joe, a former CIA operative, O’Neill embarks on a journey that will take her across the world. Eager to grapple with the complications and ambivalences of her search, she shows an aversion to the easy reductions and trite conclusions some writers settle for when writing from personal experience. There are no consolations here of self-discovery’s ready-made truisms. As the book looks inward, Tracy rejects the cozier notions of selfhood, how it’s made and bolstered. Hers is a search for truth with all its warts and contradictions. She keeps looking, looking—and thankfully, writing.
When a woman asks O’Neill what literary fiction is all about, the author responds, “It’s about failure.” Failure is one of the things Woman of Interest is not. It’s a resounding success, a book that movingly explores what constitutes a human relationship and what composes an identity. Part-noir, part-memoir, part-reflection: despite its eclectic trappings, the book always feels a coherent whole, bound by the steady presence of a funny, clever, and probing guide, and by the energetic quality of the prose. Because this is a Tracy O’Neill book, Woman of Interest charts the contours and potentials of the sentence and strives to bring every unit of prose to shimmering life. “Some squalid corner of myself had been ransacked,” writes the writer incapable of writing a slack phrase.
By phone and over email, O’Neill and I talked about our recent experiences with physical therapy; Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath; the inimitable pleasures of Borges; the novelist moonlighting as memoirist; the comforts and freedoms of constraint; and Tracy the Character.
Walker Rutter-Bowman: I want to ask about beginnings. Early on you quote William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” a rationale for leading a life that does not include your birth mother. During Covid, you read about a Korean man dying alone, who “barely took up in any space in this world.” You hear and heed the call; you agree to attend to the quest for your birth mother. “I could not stomach the notion of an orphaned old woman,” you write. Did you always know you would try to find her?
Tracy O’Neill: I wasn’t even sure I had an interest in finding her. The pandemic seemed to me to sharpen the chance that finding her could be lost, but only because I was a bit stupid. She could have been dead most of my life. But I became fixated on the image of a tiny old person dying alone in a Covid ward and suddenly I couldn’t stand it.
WRB: I love the title for its noir-y trappings, its suggestion of the procedural, but also for its ambiguity. The “woman of interest” is your birth mother, the object of your search. But you’re the woman of interest as well—someone possessed by the urge to uncover. Do those variant interpretations of the title appeal to you, and is the multiple meaning something you intended to evoke in the title and throughout the book?
TO: You nailed it. You brought up the William James line, and the idea of a woman whose experience is what she attends to mattered to me. The woman who is attended to in order for someone—whether her or someone else—to experience a confrontation with her mattered too. A person of interest is someone who might be brought in for questioning, so I was thinking, as well, about the figure who is interrogated.
WRB: I’m interested in your relationship with noir. Why does the genre hold such appeal for you? And why did it feel like the right aesthetic mood for this project?
TO: The detective perhaps finds answers—and definitely questions. In noir, there is some struggle with faith—whether that’s a faith in other people, in systems, in herself. She wants empirical process to work, for the world to make sense, even if she is jaded. The world of noir is cold. Yet the noir detective operates because of and in spite of alienation. Such irony felt true to searching for this stranger who might have been the woman who raised me.
Even before I started looking for Cho Kyu Yeon, the details I knew about her indicated that she was an outlaw of sorts. She broke codes of conventional womanhood having to do with sexuality, having to do with motherhood. Eventually, I learned that she had been a femme fatale of sorts. And, of course, I was thinking about the mystery of who we haven’t yet become.
WRB: In memoir, the writer is a character. As a novelist, what were the pleasures and challenges of creating the character Tracy O’Neill?
TO: It can be terrible to write about yourself. I’ve always been drawn to deeply flawed characters—especially the kinds that misogynist bores find “unlikable.” So in writing this book I did have some hang-ups—not for lack of flaws (I’ve got them!) but because unseemly moments were sometimes true and right for the book and not what a sensible person would broadcast about herself.
When my agent and I would speak about the book, I kept referring to “Tracy the Character.” At some point, she had to tease me about it a little. “I know you probably need to do this to keep things separate for yourself,” she said.
Even so, my editor had to point out that early on in the first draft, Tracy the Character wasn’t as full as she felt in the middle and end of the book. What I mean to say is that I still needed to treat this person as someone worth knowing. It was as though I was embarrassed to be a character in the book.
I think when it was fun for me was when I allowed myself to really go back and think about interactions with friends. The pleasure of them allowed me to be less embarrassed about writing me in relationship to them.
WRB: You mentioned pushing against likability. In constructing Tracy the Character, you were also grappling with knowability and the discomfort of making yourself known to the reader. I thought of Cho Kyu Yeon because you left her somewhat unknowable. “The truth was that if I cared to hold her to a single authentic identity, I couldn’t. There was no one real Cho Kyu Yeon.” Can you talk about that haziness that surrounds her?
I became fixated on the image of a tiny old person dying alone in a Covid ward and suddenly I couldn’t stand it.
TO: I believe that CKY has refused to be confined to a single character. And to some extent, I suppose we all do that. I was interested in the notion that we are all viscous and performing to some extent—but also changing over time. The end of the book takes a form that I hoped to create a sense of shifting ground as I turned back to myself. That form was meant to indicate the way we do contain firm aspects of selfhood and accrete new ones as we continue to experience more.
WRB: Meeting your birth relatives in Daejeon, South Korea, exposes you to endless family narratives, some of them fictional. “The bulk prose of it was hitting me,” you write. “I was going to keep getting hit by words.” And later: “It is painful to be conned by language . . . to witness language fail,” you write. Can you talk about becoming the object, the victim, of words and of story—especially when you’re so often their wielder, the one in control?
TO: Well, as I write in the book, I’m not one of those writers who loves platitudes about the power of words. Yes, they are powerful. But sometimes the power of words is terrible, as in the case of propaganda or fascist discourse or lies in intimate life. During the first year of the pandemic, we were often jerked around by the language of politicians. Many of us now are devastated by the language used to occlude violence in Gaza. And the blanket belief that literature makes us empathetic underpins the promotion of a lot of self-serving crap like Hillbilly Elegy. Language can also be beautiful, and I am so obsessed with the more beautiful power language that I often want it to overcome everything else. It doesn’t. I hate that.
WRB: There’s so much humor in this book, but at a certain point in Daejeon, your humor hits a wall. In Korea, limited by language, you’re a different person. Was the experience of not having your ready weapons—your humor, your wit, your words—instructive, revealing, or just extremely frustrating?
TO: I did try to joke anyway and failed. This is probably a character defect; I’ll try to do things even if ill or unequipped.
WRB: “To know someone was to betray the image they wanted you to receive.” Your work is interested in secrets, and how exposing the truth can both unmask and destroy the former self. To learn about your birth mother is to betray her—but also, to betray yourself. By the logic of this book, self-discovery is also self-betrayal—an idea I’m now obsessed with. But am I overstating it?
TO: I don’t think so at all! I have betrayed previous versions of myself. I used to, for instance, be attracted to living fast and dying young, or perhaps the aesthetic of live-fast-die-young. Well, I’m not young now— other than in my career in academia—and I want to live. You have to leave behind the narratives of who you are to become, and sometimes—wonderfully—it does feel as though you’re pulling a fast one on yourself.
WRB: This book pushes against dominant notions of self-actualization and self-discovery. Did you feel like you were writing against certain trends and tropes in memoir?
TO: I did mostly as I wrote the ending. For a long time I have been attracted to Iris Murdoch’s writing on a liberal literature of consolation. One part of me longed to offer a redemptive conclusion, in which the act of writing settled the unwieldy self and family. But I became aware that that would be bullshit. I needed the ending to feel as though this narrator is still in process because I am. I thought of the end of the book as closer to a lyric poem than a narrative.
WRB: Were there any books that were helpful models? Something that you could look at and say, someone has tried something similar and pulled it off.
TO: I really love The Wild Iris by Louise Glück. That’s a book that assumes a constraint: all of the poems are in theory about flowers, but the poems are also very much about faith. I remember reading that book as a college student, and I think what it opened up for me is the notion that a constraint such as flower poems or the procedural plot could act as a vehicle for a wider scope of interest.
WRB: The pleasure of adhering to the constraint and of breaking from it.
TO: Yeah, absolutely. We do it all the time in our lives. You decide to be in a relationship with somebody, you enter into a constraint. You declare a residence or a field of career. But then there’s so much that’s possible within these forms. That’s what I wanted to do at various points in the narrative.
WRB: Lauren Berlant comes up a couple times. How did their work speak to you while working on this project?
When I was trying to render my biological mother, I was thinking of how her idea of the good life was received, not merely personal.
TO: I first encountered Lauren Berlant when I took a graduate seminar with Saidiya Hartman, who is an absolute genius. I wasn’t a very good student, really, but Berlant’s work lit me up. The first Berlant I read was their writing on the good life. Then Cruel Optimism. They’re somebody who has really shaped my understanding of the way affect, which we often think to be personal, carries the DNA of ideology. When I was trying to render my biological mother, I was thinking of how her idea of the good life was received, not merely personal. I was thinking, too, about how my own optimism has often enough been underpinned by a sort of neoliberal cruelty.
WRB: In the early stages of the book you mention writing, and I’m wondering about how writing intersected with this story. How much were you writing as these events were happening?
TO: The first few chapters I wrote very shortly after the events occurred. I was trying to make sense of the story as it happened. I also wanted to imagine that this ludicrous endeavor wasn’t, and writing about it somehow legitimized it. Then I didn’t write much more for quite a while. Then I wrote another chapter. Then I paused because amongst other problems, I was writing about meeting a person—called N in the book—as we were breaking up, and I had to approach that character with less disdain than I felt at the time. Much of the book ended up being written six months after that, in the spring of 2023.
WRB: Your O’Neill family ethos is “want[ing] enough to be family at all.” I love this idea of opting in—of family being consensual, not something you’re saddled with. That ethos also suggests expanding the qualifications of family beyond who raised you, who birthed you—which you’ve done. This book is a lovely tribute to your chosen family—to Ali, Maggie, Jelly, Justin, Treska, and others. Did finding Cho Kyu Yeon feel like a way back to that chosen family—an opting in again to the family you had and have?
TO: I’m not sure I ever really was opted out. Perhaps the deal was a little more complicated. The pandemic foreclosed sharing physical space with many of those in my chosen family, and ossified the boundaries of the private sphere, that is, domestic life. The reopening of public spaces as Covid restrictions eased was crucial to returning to certain forms of connection.
That is true, and it is also true that friends showed up for me in a non-physical sense throughout the search for Cho Kyu Yeon. I always knew these people to be kind and generous and really fucking funny, but at turns I was reminded again and again. You catch these beautiful people at a different angle. So I guess I learned even more reasons to opt into chosen family than I had imagined.