WOMAN OF INTEREST

An account of the author’s search for her biological mother in 2020.

“I was thirty-three, adopted, Korean born, New England bred. Profession: writer. And because no one made a living writing anymore, profession: professor….I had not evaded taxes, but I had evaded children.” O’Neill clearly lays out the situation at the beginning, noting that her desire to find the woman who birthed her and gave her up is twofold. First, she writes, “my life depended on this missing person. I mean she had been one of my mothers.” Second, she sought “confirmation that I was a woman still able to write a new narrative into her life.” The two-time novelist and Vassar professor filed a missing person’s report for her biological mother. The ensuing conversations with a private investigator are entertaining. At the end of the year, O’Neill traveled alone to Korea for a few weeks to meet her mother. “I did not know what I was really doing,” she writes, “but perhaps a person of interest never did.” The narrative sometimes gets mired in the author’s self-focus, and the latter half describes meeting her mother in person. “She was there,” writes the author. “Right there. And the impression she gave was of an idling Xerox machine. To reach her seemed impossible.” The author’s details and nuanced layers of longing feel genuine, vulnerable, and vivid. Even after the end of the search, her investigation continued: “As it turns out, autobiography can’t be abandoned as easily as a bad alibi, or a child. At a certain point, the question is not, What will you do next? It is, once more, How did I do what I did?” This is not a story of redemption, but it is heartbreakingly human.

A propulsive, occasionally meandering memoir.