Tracy O’Neill on Interpretation

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Tracy O’Neill about her new memoir, Woman of Interest.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: In your memoir, Woman of Interest, you travel from the USA to Korea to meet your birth mother.  When you arrive, it seemed like everybody in this situation had an agenda. You even hired an interpreter that that you paid that was neutral to the family, and the interpreter was editorializing and not giving you the information that you needed. In a way, he was judging your responses.

Tracy O’Neill: Yeah, absolutely. It was such a strange moment. But, yeah, the first time that I did sit down with my biological mother. We had this interpreter on speaker phone between us, and there were moments when I wanted him to ask a question, and instead of really asking the question, he sort of told me what I should think or feel in a particular moment. And that was shocking to me. So, there were times where this did not end up really being like an exchange in the way that I sort of thought it would run. But of course, in some ways it’s really naive, right? You know that there is a third party in between. This interpreter. And so while I was very aware that maybe there would be different connotations that were intended or implied that might not be quite right when this interpreter was doing the work, I just simply hadn’t imagined that he would wish to in some way intervene, or that it would be such an uncomfortable conversation for him that perhaps he just wanted it to be over.

Mitzi Rapkin: I wonder if you hired an interpreter who turned out to be female, if it would have been a different experience.

Tracy O’Neill: I will say that the interpreter that I used was a free service, and I also kind of wonder about that, you know, like, did this person just have some sort of quota, and maybe he needed to move on to the next person calling or something.  Maybe he was supposed to hit a certain number of conversations a day in this phone interpretation service, and I didn’t ask, you know, or maybe there happened to have been other things in my mind at the time. There are so many different reasons that that could have been the case.

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Tracy O’Neill is the author of the memoir Woman of Interest. Her novels include The Hopeful, one of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2015; 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. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York; and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University. She teaches at Vassar College.