In 'The Manicurist's Daughter,' a refugee family goes on after its matriarch's death
Author Susan Lieu transforms her acclaimed 2019 one-woman show — 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother -- into a memoir of her family after the death of her mother due to botched plastic surgery.
In The Manicurist's Daughter, author Susan Lieu takes her acclaimed 2019 one-woman show — 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother — one step further, translating her performance's whirlwind-yet-self-contained approach into a well-paced, panoramic memoir.
In this iteration, Lieu's narrative — juxtaposing her Vietnamese American family's refugee trajectory with her mother's 1996 death at the hands of an uninsured plastic surgeon — delves deeper into her family's dynamics in the decades following her mother's death, to explore how this loss has been
