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MOST ANTICIPATED READ and MUST READ OF 2024: The Millions , LitHub , Esquire , BookRiot , Bustle , Vulture , Boston Globe , Brit & Co , Southern Living 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 and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she''d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea. After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O''Neill 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 discover--the possibility that her biological mother was her 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 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. 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 hopes of the woman of interest she is both chasing and becoming.
