Raised by vivacious and uncompromising Irish American dad and mom in Massachusetts, Tracy O’Neill didn’t spend a lot time fascinated by her Korean start mom or the circumstances of her adoption till the COVID-19 pandemic made her out of the blue ponder whether the mom she by no means knew would possibly, in actual fact, be about to die alone. Her mom turned her “girl of curiosity,” and O’Neill’s hardboiled detective-style memoir particulars her journey via her personal private historical past—and ultimately to South Korea—to search out her.
Many memoirs provide a fastidiously rendered image of previous occasions, with a decent thematic focus. O’Neill is after one thing completely different with Lady of Curiosity. By selecting the tone of a noir, she inhabits a story house stuffed with macabre humor, plot twists and offbeat characters. Her sentences run to the jangling and unpredictable rhythms of the traditional detective story, with spare descriptions and snappy, deadpan dialogue: “So that you graduated?” a social employee who handles adoptions asks O’Neill. “Good for you. Loads of the youngsters don’t graduate.” The creator makes use of the style’s tropes—chapter titles embody “Go away No Witness,” “Purple Herring” and “A Stranger Involves City”—to recast the story of her life as a sort of meta-nonfiction: “I might confuse my life for experimental literature with potentialities of diffuse narrative views,” she writes, “nevertheless it nonetheless adhered to realism.”
O’Neill’s journey is complicated, overwhelming and deeply human. It’s the story not solely of an adopted youngster dealing with the important questions of all adopted kids, but in addition, and extra universally, the story of a seek for residence. As such, the phrase “girl of curiosity” applies to O’Neill in addition to her mom. Via describing interactions along with her household, her mates, her beloved canine, Cowboy, and an earthy, semi-wild boyfriend whom she refers to as N., O’Neill studies on a quest that, whereas uniquely her personal when it comes to type and content material, can also be relatable to anybody who has ever regarded within the mirror and puzzled, “Who am I, actually? And who’re my folks?”
