The writer and the adoptee have something in common: They are both in search of a story. They both move through the world looking for characters, plot and arc. For the writer, it’s a professional or vocational obsession. For the adoptee, it’s central to their lives.
Those who search for their birth families work to answer questions about unknown characters, uncover the plot lines of their pasts and complete their own arcs — from abandoned child to complete person. But what if the reality doesn’t match what you’ve written in your head?
The intersection between writing and the adoptee experience is a theme explored in Women of Interest, a memoir by Tracey O’Neill. The book chronicles O’Neill’s search for her birth mother and return to South Korea, the country of her birth, at the height of the pandemic. At different points in the book, it’s a detective story, an adventure story, a tragedy, absurdist fiction and a farce.
Most of all, it’s a meditation on the universal need to create stories of our lives. Like writing, it’s a way of making sense of human existence.
You can tell that this book is more than just a simple memoir and recounting of events from its opening paragraph. In keeping with a memoir about writing, it’s very writerly:
“A few years back, despite a lifelong renunciation of the urge, I surrendered to an obsession with a woman. So I was beside myself. I was myself. It was no time to basket-case through life. I did. I wanted her, wanted everything, and all of her was missing.”
The woman of interest in the title and in this passage is the author’s birth mother, and the first part of the book is written as noir. You can imagine these words spoken in voiceover as it pans in black and white to the author — perhaps wearing a fedora and a trench coat. References to the author Raymond Chandler, the film Touch of Evil and similar noirish details follow. Even a detective named Joe shows up.
And just when you get used to the noir, the writing switches to another style. And then another and another, although with rhythms and tones that are less obvious than the opening chapters.
There are references to writing throughout the book, as she creates analogies between her search and the act of writing. In an early chapter, she writes that maybe instead of searching, she should “write a noir novel about a woman whose committed crime was a birth.” As she ponders theories, she writes, “Staking out possibilities was, after all, a writer’s long racket.”
This all results in a reading experience unlike other experiences reading memoirs. Many memoirs are personal, confessional, direct and emotional. It takes some mental work to follow the prose in Woman of Interest, with its stylistic flourishes and meta commentary.
But its multiple personalities serve the themes of the book. The artificiality of some passages creates a distance between the author and what she experiences through reunion. This distance is just like the search itself.
She writes about what she’s trying to accomplish through reunion: “Get you outside the time you knew, outside your story. Break into another life with more knowledge and loot it. The routes of my routine self were elsewhere because I had asked to go elsewhere.”
This distance may make Woman of Interest the most honest depiction of a birth family search. The common narrative is the joy of reunion. But the reality is that, by searching, a transnational adoptee goes to a country with a completely different culture to meet people whom they don’t know but with whom they share the most intimate of stories.
One can imagine how it could be surreal, lonely and alienating.
As O’Neill meets her family, she unravels story after story, lie after lie. She goes in search of truth, but as she writes, “There was nothing outside of representation.”
