Woman of Interest
A Memoir
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- Reserva
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- Lanzamiento previsto: 25 jun 2024
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- 21,99 €
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- Reserva
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- 21,99 €
Descripción editorial
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist O'Neill (Quotients) delivers a riveting account of her search for her birth mother. Fresh off a breakup in 2020, a 33-year-old O'Neill, who was raised by adoptive parents in New England, became newly curious about her origins. She entrusted a private investigator with what limited information she had about her birth mother, but after a promising start, the investigator ghosted her, leaving behind a tangle of loose ends. Determined to see the inquiry through, O'Neill used a DNA database to locate a blood relative, who then virtually introduced her to her mother's siblings in South Korea. Though Covid-19 cases were peaking at the time, O'Neill traveled to Korea on the advice of these relatives, who promised that they'd introduce her to her mother. While O'Neill completed a sleepless 10-day quarantine, she reflected on how her search was related to her own doubts and fears about becoming a mother. The narrative culminates with O'Neill and her mother finally meeting at a tense dinner party, an experience that left O'Neill with more questions than answers about the circumstances that led to her adoption. In cool, noir-tinted prose shot through with wit and compassion, O'Neill presents her inquiry as a sort of metaphysical detective story. Readers will be enthralled.