Coming June 25, 2024
Woman of Interest appears on:
Esquire's Best Memoirs of 2024
"O’Neill invites readers to consider the complex and often confounding nature of family mythology in Woman of Interest—a funny, effervescent addition to the memoir-as-detective-story genre."
The New Yorker Briefly Noted
"Dark, deeply funny memoir...Dashiell Hammett meets 'Fleabag.'"
Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2024
"It’s a quest which 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.' I adore O’Neill’s writing—which is always probing and cerebral, lyrical and humane."
Vulture's Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer
"O’Neill’s delightfully willful memoir recounts the twists and turns in her detective’s hunt, from being ghosted by a private investigator to heading to Korea at the height of lockdown. O’Neill is a true stylist; her prose brims with intelligence, energy, and humor. This memoir exploring identity and family is unlike any other."
The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2024
"An intimate memoir written with the narrative propulsion of a detective novel."
Oprah Daily's Summer Reading List
"Incisive memoir—an investigation to track down her birth mother, who lives across the world in South Korea. In college, O’Neill had discovered a green folder containing her Korean passport and adoption documents. It’s 2020 now, and she’s hired a private investigator to finally fill in the gaps. When their search hits a dead end, O’Neill gets on a plane to Seoul. The result, in part, is this urgent, atmospheric memoir meets noir about family shadows, writing, and the pursuit of searching for answers we know we might never find."
Boston Globe's Summer Reading Preview
"One of the most distinctive prose stylists writing today."
Bustle's Most Anticipated Summer Books
"O'Neill leverages her significant talent to infuse the tension of a hard-boiled mystery novel into an exploration of motherhood, identity, and belonging."
Publisher's Weekly Starred Review:
"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 riveted."
Also: BookRiot's Must-Read Nonfiction New Releases in June, Cultured Mag's Summer Reading List, Literary Hub's The Ultimate Summer 2024 Reading List, Bibliolifestyle's Summer Reading Guide, New York Post Best New Books to Read, New York Times 6 New Books We Recommend This Week, Bookshop.org's 100 Best Books of 2024, the New York Public Library Book of the Day, the Crimereads Best-Reviewed Books of June, and Southern Living's New Beach Reads Perfect for Summer 2024.
Woman of Interest is one of Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of July.
What people are saying:
“With Woman of Interest, Tracy O’Neill solidifies her status as one of our greatest living prose stylists. With a singular wit and brilliance, O’Neill expands the horizons of the memoir, pushing the boundaries of the genre into the realm of detective noir and thrilling quest narrative. O’Neill’s formal innovations and bracing prose create a new and invigorating lens through which readers can view a universal theme: the desire to search for the self and one’s source.”
—Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty
"Woman of Interest is a memoir wrapped in a mystery—an inward examination of family, identity, and self, but also an actual gumshoe detective story that takes the author to the other side of the world. With each extraordinary, prickly sentence, O’Neill’s search for her biological mother is conjured with clarity and conflict. This is a work that is funny, moving, mean—an exceptional book from an extraordinary writer.”
—Kevin Nguyen, author of New Waves
""Know this: Tracy O’Neill has a novelist’s sense of narrative, the eye and ear of a poet, and the luminous mind of a young philosopher—gifts woven into an innovative, propulsive, and trenchant memoir about the search for self and one’s roots as well as the evolution of family myths. This book, as is Tracy, is an exemplar of literary brilliance."
—Mitchell Jackson, author of Residue Years and Survival Math
"WOMAN OF INTEREST is a brilliantly constructed Russian doll of a memoir—a profound meditation on language and desire within an insightful family mythology within a propulsive detective story. How does Tracy O’Neill hold it all together? With a rare combination of exquisite prose, good humor, and intellectual rigor.”
—Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks
"Memoir that is simultaneously an investigation, a noir with a femme fatale, and a darkly humorous tale about what happens when one meets the person who has everything to do and nothing to do with one's life...a gorgeously melancholic recounting of O'Neill's upbringing...singular and transcendent."
—Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace in BOMB Magazine
“By choosing the tone of a noir, she inhabits a narrative space full of macabre humor, plot twists and offbeat characters. Her sentences run to the jangling and unpredictable rhythms of the classic detective story, with spare descriptions and snappy, deadpan dialogue… O’Neill’s journey is confusing, overwhelming and deeply human. It is the story not only of an adopted child facing the essential questions of all adopted children, but also, and more universally, the story of a search for home. As such, the phrase ‘woman of interest’ applies to O’Neill as well as her mother. Through describing interactions with her family, her friends, her beloved dog, Cowboy, and an earthy, semi-wild boyfriend whom she refers to as N., O’Neill reports on a quest that, while uniquely her own in terms of form and content, is also relatable to anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and wondered, ‘Who am I, really? And who are my people?’”
— Kelly Blewett, Bookpage
"A genre-expanding noir memoir-detective story, full of drama, intrigue, bizarre characters,
even more bizarre behavior, and unexpected twists.” - Beverly Armento, New York Journal of Books
"What experimental jazz would be like if it were a written narrative. Funny, shocking, and emotionally charged, the memoir takes readers on her journey of self-discovery and finding what family means."
-- Library Journal
"The author’s details and nuanced layers of longing feel genuine, vulnerable, and vivid...heartbreakingly human."
— Kirkus Reviews
WOMAN OF INTEREST PREORDERS
