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Open Book, Open Mind; Tracy O'Neill, "Woman of Interest"

A Memoir

A prize-winning novelist discusses her first work of nonfiction, a genre-bending story of finding her missing birth mother in South Korea, with acclaimed novelist Catherine Chung.

The event is free but registration is required. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. After the discussion, there will be a Q&A period and a book signing and sale with Watchung Booksellers. 

Open Book / Open Mind is sponsored by Montclair Public Library Foundation, Watchung Booksellers, the New Jersey Council on Humanities, Anonymous, Rosemary Iversen, Diana and Joe Lunin, David and Mary Lee Jones and an anonymous donor. We are also grateful for the generous support of our in-kind sponsors, First Congregational Church of Montclair, The George, and Amanti Vino. To support Open Book / Open Mind and other library programs, click here to donate.

Tracy O'Neill is also the author of "The Hopeful," and "Quotients," a New York Times​ New & Noteworthy Book, TOR Editor's Choice, & Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, LitHub, The Guardian, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She teaches at Vassar College.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“O’Neill elevates the subgenre, producing a memoir that is simultaneously an investigation, a noir with a femme fatale, and a darkly humorous tale of what happens when one meets the person who has everything and nothing to do with one’s life. Woman of Interest is searching, yes, but more attuned to language and paranoia than others of its genre … Although O’Neill’s memoir is essentially concerned with her mother in Korea, the titular woman of interest, we also get a sense of the other mother in a gorgeously melancholic recounting of O’Neill’s upbringing by her adoptive family in New England … Instead of the reparative gestures of a traditional adoptee memoir, Woman of Interest offers something darker, colder, more fraught, and ultimately, singular and transcendent.”—BOMB

“A story about secrecy, intimacy, and hidden systems, O'Neill's sentences are expertly crafted marvels of economy. Her prose feels almost redacted, as if someone has cut out just the right bits to keep you guessing and thinking and feeling."—Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of ​"Interior Chinatown."

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Catherine Chung, the author of "The Tenth Muse," is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director's Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was a Granta New Voice, and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, "Forgotten Country," which was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before going to Cornell University for her MFA. She has published work in The New York Times and Granta, and lives in Montclair. She is a member of the Open Book / Open Mind advisory committee.

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