Woman of Interest

A National Book Foundations 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 ONeill 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 shed never metmay be dying somewhere in South Korea. Hiring a grizzled private investigator, ONeill 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 discoverthe possibility that her biological mother was her own kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her ownwas too tempting. Written like a mystery novel, Woman of