Memoir Meets Detective Story with Padma Viswanathan and Tracy O’Neill

Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT July 24, 2024

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

The Center for Fiction welcomes two accomplished authors—Padma Viswanathan and Tracy O’Neill—to celebrate their new books which blend the detective genre with memoir. Viswanathan, a Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist, tells the tale of her friendship with Phillip, a kind, working-class queer man, in her book, Like Every Form of Love. Phillip shares with Viswanathan the story of his checkered childhood, his abusive father, and his illusive stepmother Del who happens to be a convicted bank robber. While Phillip allows Viswanathan to tell his story, she begins to fear the harm that retelling his traumas will do to both him and their friendship. O’Neill, an alum of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship program, also explores a tantalizing mystery through her memoir Woman of Interest. The book follows O’Neill as she becomes her own detective, investigating what happened to the mysterious mother she never met. Featuring a femme fatale and a former CIA operative, her search for her biological mother illuminates the kind of woman she is and wants to be. Viswanathan and O’Neill will discuss their memoirs and the ways by which they broke genre conventions to craft their stories. After the conversation, both authors will sign books.

In Conversation

Padma Viswanathan

Padma Viswanathan

Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian American writer and translator. Her novels have been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and others. She has published short fiction, essays and translations in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Full-length translations include São Bernardo, by Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos and Where We Stand, by the philosopher Djamila Ribeiro. A new novel, The Charterhouse of Padma, is forthcoming in 2024. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas—Fayetteville, where she is Founding Director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program.

Photo Credit: Alex Tran
Tracy O'Neill

Tracy O'Neill

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, longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was named an Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction. 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.

Photo Credit: Oskar Miarka

Featured Books

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Like Every Form of Love

By Padma Viswanathan

Published by Random House of Canada

PURCHASE

Padma Viswanathan was staying on a houseboat on Vancouver Island when she struck up a friendship with a warm-hearted, working-class queer man named Phillip. Their lives were so different it seemed unlikely to Padma that their relationship would last after she returned to her usual life. But, that week, Phillip told her a story from his childhood that kept them connected for more than twenty years.

Phillip was the son of a severe, abusive man named Harvey, a miner, farmer and communist. After Phillip’s mother left the family, Harvey advertised for a housekeeper-with-benefits. And so Del, the most glamorous and loving of stepmothers, stepped into Phillip’s life. Del had hung out with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Mexico City before the Cuban revolution; she was also a convicted bank robber who had violated her parole and was suspected in her ex-husband’s murder. Phillip had long since lost track of Del, but when Padma said she’d like to write about her and about his own young life, he eagerly agreed. Quickly, though, Padma’s research uncovered hidden truths about these larger-than-real-life characters. Watching the effects on Phillip as these secrets, evasions and traumas came to light, she increasingly feared that when it came to the book or the friendship, only one of them would get out of this process alive.

In this unforgettable memoir, Padma reflects on the joys and frictions of this strange journey with grace, humour and poetry, including original readings of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales and other stories that beautifully echo her characters’ adventures and her own. Like Every Form of Love is that rare thing: an irresistible literary page-turner that twists and turns, delivering powerful revelations, right to the very end.
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Woman of Interest

By Tracy O'Neill

Published by HarperCollins

PURCHASE

In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea.

After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart when he disappeared before the job was done, picking up the trail of clues and becoming her own hell-bent detective. Despite COVID-19, the promise of what she might discover—the possibility that her biological mother was her kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own—was too tempting.

Written like a mystery novel, Woman of Interest is a tale of self-discovery and fugitivity from convention that features a femme fatale of unique proportions, a former CIA operative with a criminal record, and a dogged investigator of radical connections outside the nuclear family. O’Neill gorgeously bends the detective genre to her own will as a writer, stepping out of the shadows of her own self-conception to illuminate the hopes of the woman of interest she is both chasing and becoming.

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