Episode 2111: Tracy O’Neill’s Return to South Korea to Discover her Birth Mother

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 Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was named a Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writers Fellow. O’Neill teaches at Vassar College, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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