Picture a woman living in a new city when the pandemic hits, waking up every day wondering if she will find a person before they die. The woman: Tracy O’Neill. The person: Cho Kyu Yeon, her Korean mother whom she only met once before being sent away for adoption.
This was my first impression of Tracy O’Neill, Associate Professor of English and author of “Woman of Interest,” published in Spring 2024. I was an incoming freshman, reading books by Vassar faculty in the midst of the humidity-filled lethargy that summer brings, and I did not get far into O’Neill’s memoir before I knew I wanted to meet her. The book is a personal account, and centers on O’Neill as she searches for her birth mother. O’Neill follows leads and tracks her down in Korea, crossing the world during the height of COVID-19, to meet her. This investigation leads her to some extraordinary people, beginning with the hiring of a private detective known only as Joe Adams—a nondescript name fit for a pseudonym.
“Keep the lights off,” she told me. This was my second first impression of O’Neill. I knew she taught creative writing here at Vassar, and the vivid noir-like prose made me want to learn how to write like her. However, conflicting schedules have, thus far, prevented me from taking her class. Still, I did know a few things about her from reading the book. I knew she was Korean-born and adopted by an Irish family in New England. I knew, six years ago, she left Brooklyn—a place she’d lived for many years—to teach here. Finally, I knew a host of personal details, little stories from her life, put far better in her prose than I could sum up here. I entered her office at precisely 5 p.m., and the world was already dim. She said the lights were ugly. We would speak in the dark. She was dressed in all black—black top, black pants, even black boots with thick soles—leaving only her face to stand out in contrast. I wondered if, since working with a private investigator, she took meetings like them.
I was not far from the truth. The memoir, especially the first half, is intentionally written like a mystery novel. The detective Adams looms large in the story despite his short on-page time. He is the hook that drew me in when I began reading, though I only ever saw glimpses of him: former weapons smuggler, spy, world traveler—for reasons far from tourism. He was the kind of person I thought lived separately from us normal people. I could not fathom how O’Neill came to patronize him.
It turns out, there was a lot I forgot about the pandemic.
“The book really begins at a moment that I would say, both culturally and personally, were about a loss of faith in institutions,” she told me, referring to the massive distrust of and reasonable doubt placed on governments and the information they distributed in the pandemic. This disillusionment in institutions is what led her to hire a private investigator—a profession so far from most people’s lives that many would not consider under normal circumstances. O’Neill said that in the face of broken public systems, the investigation became a “private pursuit.”
This is far from the only time the zeitgeist of the pandemic colors the story. After tracking down her eomma (Korean for mother) and contacting some members of her family, O’Neill flies to South Korea to meet them. At this point, she has yet to fully uncover the circumstances surrounding her birth and adoption and is hoping that the people who were there could give some answers. While she is staying with them, Wonyi—O’Neill’s cousin—leaves her a letter that purports to clear up the details. The only problem: The letter claimed Cho Kyu Yeon, her eomma, had miscarried, yet her child was reading the letter. Her family was lying to her. “Even when I desperately wanted to believe everything, I simply couldn’t,” O’Neill said. “It really would’ve, I suppose, required me to be the sort of person who believes that drinking bleach was going to cure COVID.” During this time, she was also confined to Wonyi’s apartment because of South Korea’s quarantine for international travelers, so she could not leave. Not that she wanted to, of course.
Despite being trapped in an apartment with a family that she felt she could not trust, O’Neill never indicates that she was scared. “My biggest fear was that I was going to walk away having no sense of this person at all,” she said. The need to find Cho Kyu Yeon, to know her before she died, made all other dangers seem small.
When they do meet, the deception continues. Cho Kyu Yeon appears as a woman so obsessed with vanity and what her daughter thinks of her that she refuses to admit she had willingly given her up for adoption. She holds adamant to a falsified narrative, one scientifically impossible. “In some ways, that fear is what happened. I don’t really understand the inner life of my mother,” O’Neill said. Then she corrected herself, “my eomma.”
In the reflective final chapter of the memoir—entitled “Postmortem”—O’Neill writes of moving past her fixation on Cho Kyu Yeon. But this may have been optimistic, at least to think it would happen quickly. “I do wonder sometimes if I’ve fully moved on from it because I haven’t written a lot since I wrote ‘Woman of Interest,’” she told me. In writing, she had spent so long in her own head, writing over and over again about her obsession, that she now had trouble writing characters with different voices.
After she said this, the room had grown so dark that she had to turn on the bright, ugly, yellow lights.