Keen On

If you liked Davy Chou’s excellent 2022 movie, Return to Seoul, then Tracy O’Neill’s new memoir, Woman of Interest, might be for you. Both movie and book are about an a female adoptee’s return to South Korea in search of their mysterious birth mother. Chou’s movie features a heartbreakingly lost Ji-Min Park wandering through life in the West and finally stumbling emptily onto the foggy truth of her Korean origins. O’Neill’s non-fictional quest for her mother, in contrast, contains more agency and her quest eventually resulted in what her publisher describes as “the priceless power of self-knowledge.” There’s is an awkwardness to my conversation with O’Neill which actually makes her appear more like the lost heroine in Return To Seoul than she might like to acknowledge. Or maybe, as some think, I’m just an aggressively insensitive interviewer. Tracy O’Neill is the author of the novels The Hopeful and Quotients. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Center for