Woman of Interest: About Tracy O’Neill’s latest memoir release and her experiences as an author and academic

On Thursday, September 12 at 6pm, author Tracy O’Neill will be in conversation with Jonathan Lee at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY, to discuss the release of her new book, Woman of Interest. After reading this compelling memoir, I had the honor of speaking with O’Neill herself to learn more about her life, writing process, and the ideas that fueled the creation of her latest work. Because I found her arrangement of language and techniques for voicing her experiences so captivating, I thought there was no better approach than to showcase O’Neill’s ideas in her own insightful words.

What is your background in writing? How did you first get into it? Has it been a lifelong passion, or did your interest in writing develop more recently?

I began storytelling at a very young age. There’s a part of the book where I talk about my father telling me bedtime stories that he made up. When I realized that one could do that with stories – you didn’t just have to read them in books – I wanted to make up my own stories to tell him.

But I didn’t know that I wanted to be a writer necessarily. When I graduated from college, I thought that I would go into civil rights law, and I was volunteering at Lambda Legal, actually, when I first moved to the city. But a few years after I moved to the city, I was working at a nightclub, Webster Hall, and they hosted the first off-site event that the Strand Bookstore had ever had. It was Chuck Palahniuk and Amy Hempel reading. I didn’t know who Amy Hempel was, so I went out and I bought her book. I started reading it, and I was completely dazzled by what she could do with a sentence. So, I really started getting serious about writing then.

How would you describe your experience in the world of academia?

I did an MFA. And after that, I did a PhD at Columbia in communications, which is sort of like media studies. I was writing the first novel while I was an MFA student. I was writing the second one while I was a PhD student. And then this memoir I was writing while teaching at Vassar. So, you can sort of see different parts of my life marked out by each book, in a way.

What do you teach at Vassar College, and what have you taught in the past?

I mostly teach creative writing, but I also teach an experimental literature course, which I love. That one is really fun, because we’re reading all the weirdo lit., and then trying out different constraints and procedures. There’s a sense of play.

What sort of writing do you specialize in? Do you have a favorite genre or style?

I love not choosing, but I am really drawn to voice-driven narratives and more experimental work.

What does your writing process look like? How do you navigate your word choice and syntax? Does it come naturally or are there intentional methods to constructing your sentences and passages?

When I’m writing, I am often leading with sound, so I’m thinking a lot about the rhythms of the sentences and how those correspond with the meaning, building out clusters of sound and then pulling away from them. I’m often trying to create miniature plots within sentences or paragraphs. It’s sort of like puzzle-making for me. I’m trying to create conditions that I can subvert to then shift the sense of meaning or be even a little bit jarring.

While writing Woman of Interest, what was your approach to the organization and the overall style of the memoir? Did anything about your process differ for this memoir, especially because it was so personal and heartfelt?

I’m still definitely working that way in terms of the sentence. Looking at the larger structure of the book, I was thinking about this as a personal narrative that was also an investigation so it would have noir inflections throughout. This gave me a little bit of vocabulary to lean on. So, the diction includes phrases or words that might feel native to noir.

But then there are also influences that are more literary. You know, I’m a huge Joan Didion fan, I love DeLillo, and I love some of the big Southern voices of the late 20th century, like Barry Hannah.

I also knew when I was writing this book that the primary chronology was going to be 2020 until where it ended. That gave me a general framework, but then I was making decisions about what to include. What don’t I include? How much am I going to flashback? How much of my childhood will be a part of this book?

I found it impressive that you put words to really specific feelings in accessible ways and in a relatable, stream-of-consciousness format in Woman of Interest. Do you have a specific approach to accomplishing this?

I wrote the beginning couple of chapters pretty shortly after the events themselves transpired. And then, I would take long breaks from the book, and then come back to it.

Do you have any specific techniques for remembering the vivid, tangible details that you have woven throughout Woman of Interest? For instance, did you write down conversations and observations directly after they happened, or were you able to recall them as you got into the zone of writing later on?

Well, a lot of the moments in the book, especially the ones that happened in Korea, simply remain very vivid to me, I think, because they were so important to my life and felt so outside of my normal routine. I also think that I’m somebody who is always, in a way, telling stories in my head. A lot of it is that, and a lot of it is just being really interested in people.

How did you come up with the secondary source concepts and quotes you synthesized into the piece? Did certain quotes come to mind as you wrote?

I have spent so much of my life in school. It’s ridiculous. I just kept going back to school over and over again in my early adulthood. So, I’ve lived this life in books, and I think while certainly, I often am connecting one experience to another, I’m also often connecting experiences to things I’ve read, or movies I’ve watched, or a song that I love.

Some of the people that are invoked in the book are thinkers that I have returned to many times, like Lauren Berlant and Roland Barthes. These are people that have created nodes of my worldview.

Throughout the story of your memoir, language and the navigation of text and translation are a common thread and play a major role in how events transpire or how they are perceived. Language is something to be played with, to give to others, it can fail, it can succeed. What does language mean to you? In other words, what do you think it has accomplished in your own life and your relationships with others?

I’m always thinking about language, and what we can capture with language, and what language sometimes fails to do for us. But I think one of the big themes that the book is interested in is the way in which language can be social, how it can do things like make a family a family.

There are many ordinary instances in our lives in which we understand that language does something, like writing a contract, stating marriage vows, and so on and so forth. I’m interested in what language can do. I’m also interested in the ways in which language doesn’t always live up to the utopian ideal.

There are a couple of examples that I give in the book, obviously, of the way that language is used to manipulate people or the way that language creates unjust systems that we feel are natural or inevitable but are not. Hopeful engagement with language is something that I would consider to be a foundational part of my personality.

What do you think finding your mother ultimately meant to you? How does this differ from what you initially thought it would mean for you, prior to finding her and meeting her?

One thing that became apparent after I met my mother was how much I had wanted it to be a transformative experience. I wasn’t aware how much I craved self-transformation.

The presence of the pandemic plays a key role in your story. It serves as a limiting reference point as your story unravels. While it’s difficult to posit what might have gone differently had it not occurred, do you think it was the deciding factor in embarking on your journey?

In a way it was illogical, because my mother could have been dead for my entire life. But there was so much attention given – early on in the pandemic – to older people dying of COVID.

I remember reading an article about a woman who was not allowed to be with her father, and her talking to him on the phone, instead, as he was dying, and this being a very sad, mediated way of saying goodbye.

I became aware of such narratives, and it forced me to regard more closely that me not doing anything wasn’t delaying a choice. It was choosing not to try for connection. I became aware that my own indecision was a time bomb.

In her essay “Home Is Not Just A Place,” Edwidge Danticat says, “writing is also home, a sometimes-broken home that we are trying to put back together again, but still a home nonetheless.” Do you consider writing a home? What is writing to you? What role does it play in your life?

That’s so interesting. I think that writing is a way for me to look at my own mind, and in the process of looking at one’s own mind, it finds a way of belonging through explanation of itself. So, I guess you could say that is akin to homebuilding, or perhaps making oneself at home.

Especially toward the end of your memoir, you reflect on various moments of home, and refer to layers of home, too. What does home mean to you, even when you can’t immediately see someone in person? How does it manifest itself in your life?

One of the heroes of the book is my friend Ali. He lives in Berlin, but I talk to him basically every day. There’s another friend in the book who’s mentioned, Maggie. She came from Iowa out to the book launch in Brooklyn. And so, I don’t necessarily see these people every single day in the way that many people see a nuclear family. But I’m so incredibly close with them. There are parts of myself that in a way only exist with these other people or because of these other people.

Did you find it difficult sharing this memoir with the world, especially since the story is so vulnerable, being about your own family and identity?
Well, while writing the book, I had to delude myself that nobody was going to read the book. And, at the same time, harbor a different delusion, which was that people were going to read the book, and that I was trying to give them something.

But it’s horrifying to share so much of yourself. For months before the book came out, I was absolutely wringing my hands with anxiety, because you write the book and you understand that there are things that you need to do to be honest in the work, and for it to be the best book that it can be. Those aren’t always compatible with what a sensible person would share about themselves to the world indiscriminately.

But ultimately, when I do the work, it isn’t worth it to me to write the book and try to write the respectable narrative, because that’s rarely the best narrative.

Do you have any words of advice to writers? What do you wish you had known before starting out and getting published?

The first thing that I would say is to read as much as possible, and don’t try to read the greatest hits. Follow your interests in the reading, because that’s going to inform your voice as a writer.

Secondly, I would say to not be afraid, because nobody wants to read your cautious personal narrative.

Finally, you just have to keep putting the work in day after day. Writing is an endurance sport.

Tracy O’Neill’s memoir, Woman of Interest, is out now and available for purchase. For more information and to get your copy, please visit tracyoneill.net. To learn more and register for her upcoming Oblong Books event on September 12 at 6pm, please visit oblongbooks.com/event/tracy-oneill-woman-of-interest. Oblong Books is located at 6422 Montgomery Street, Rhinebeck, NY.