Susan Lieu’s debut memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter (Celadon Books, 2024), explores her journey to finding answers about herself, family, and identity after her mother dies during an elective plastic surgery procedure.
While Lieu’s memoir takes us through the above mentioned journey, it also speaks deeply and poignantly about body image, food, connection, belonging, race, girlhood, womanhood, and finding the courage to live life exactly as one sees fit, not as is expected by others. I would never say a book has something for everyone, but I can’t imagine a person reading this memoir and not seeing themselves somewhere in the pages.
Via a remote call, Lieu and I discussed her undertaking in creating the memoir, what it means to be an artist, and the connection we can all find from reaching one another’s stories.
***
The Rumpus: First of all, congratulations on this beautiful book. I loved it so much. I finished reading it last week on a flight, and I was sobbing next to a random man who was side-eyeing me, and I don’t cry in public! I am not a public crier. The last time I cried in public, I had just found out I had a miscarriage. And then there was no time before that.
Susan Lieu: Oh my god, what about it made you cry?
Rumpus: I think it was the relationship with your mom and how the thought of her changed more as you were becoming a mother. All new mothers can relate to that sudden, changing perspective of our own moms. It’s quite jarring and moving. What I’ve always loved most about memoir is finding these deep connections with people who seem fully unlike you. How long did it take you to write this book? And since you’ve also told this story through the form of a live show, did you or do you have any other ideas for formatting this particular story?
Lieu: I have so many answers to that! The first one is that I’ve been writing this book since the day she [Susan’s mother] passed. I formally started writing about my family during fall 2017 with my first show, 140 LBS. The entire show is me looking for answers, and every time I learned something new, I put it in the show as a different iteration. I always say that every show, on average, took five drafts. There’s about like, thirty-eight drafts in the making of the final product of the book, and the book could not exist without all the research that it took to make the shows.
Rumpus: Wow. I’m always shocked at the number of drafts people work through to find their final product. I think many writers who are working on their book have this idea that it’s a handful of drafts and tweaks, but it’s never that easy. Hearing you say that out loud is great confirmation for people to just dig into the rewriting and not be afraid to make huge pivots if needed. Did you have any other ideas for formatting this story?
Lieu: I feel daring when I’m high, so I took an edible one night and drew on a piece of paper what I wanted: I wanted to do a show, a book, a podcast, a museum exhibit, and a TV or movie. Our society is so siloed. Either you’re indie, mainstream, or you’re into poetry about the forest floor. What would it look like for me to learn in all these mediums, playing all these mediums, and reach people in different ways? That was the original vision. I don’t think I would ever say that out loud, sober. I wouldn’t have the audacity to even dream all these things about a story. I’m not even allowed to talk about my own story with my family. But after I made the list, I could see it. It’s so clear. Now I have a podcast called Model Minority Moms, where we talk about how to be everything for everyone by ourselves, and we talked about how motherhood obliterates your career and your sense of self and shines a quick mirror on all your traumas that you have to face. I had the play. I’ve been in the Wing Luke Museum, and then we have this book. I think the magic is in the cross-pollination. We can translate different styles in other ways. I’m thirty-eight. When my mom passed, she was thirty-eight. I did that, and that was significant.
Rumpus: Once you decided on the format of a memoir, how did you figure out which moments of your life would be in the book? It’s so difficult knowing you can’t fit in everything, and I assume some moments that maybe worked in the show weren’t the right fit for the memoir.
Lieu: A lot of Post-it notes died in the making of this memoir. In 2020, I brainstormed every story that I felt would be relevant in the book and stuffed them into the book proposal which manifested itself as the chapter outline—and never followed again in the actual writing of the thing. The March 2021 whiteboard shot is my very scared attempt to drum up an interesting book now that my editor was watching.
For a while, it was very confusing on how I would organize the book. Was it a full-on chronological narrative? How and when I time traveled was always an ongoing discussion with my book doctor. Since it was unclear, I wrote every passage I thought needed to be written and then stared at it in a ginormous Google doc. There were many “parking lots” that I knew were just graveyards. A full year passed, and many hundreds of thousands of words later, I was beginning to see the real bones of the book as you can see in the January and April 2022 Post-it note brainstorm. But even then, I hadn’t nailed my first chapter. In June 2022, my editor finally said the word “terrific” to me, and then I knew I was heading in the right direction.
It was when my editor suggested organizing the book around the six meanings of “ma” that the time traveling migration happened. Sometimes I would just stare at the whiteboard, move notes, and then see how it felt. I think the hardest part was revealing my father as a character—chronologically as opposed to emotionally. It made sense that it had to come at the end, so then I had to rearrange other pieces to create the right amount of breathing room for each story. It was a lot of moving around all the way until the end. Sometimes the book had to reveal itself to me, advice I really hated that I received but is so true.
Rumpus: How did you decide what to translate and what to leave in Vietnamese? There’s a lot of recent conversation on what to do regarding translations. What was your experience?
Lieu: Most of the time, I will translate, or I will usually deeply imply what just happened. The point is not to be a dictionary. The point is not to translate everything right. Sometimes I leave some Easter eggs there just for those who are Vietnamese. Stylistically, I’m trying to flow you in and out in a different way and give you variety, like a buffet.
In the nail salon scene, where we think that they’re going to be health inspectors but they’re cops from some department trying to get my mom’s counterfeit bags back, the technicians just say, “Son of a bitch.” You wouldn’t think your nail tech is going to have that type of rawness to them or edginess. That’s what we really say. I want to reveal that for you to see the multiple dimensions. I felt like that was worthwhile to translate.
What I do try to do is other the reader. Instead of putting Vietnamese in italics, and it’s a blessing because Vietnamese uses Roman letters, so I was able to play in this way. Any English translation is in italics. I want the reader to feel other like I felt other my entire life. And I’m not going to continue to other the Vietnamese language, let me just do the inverse of that. It’s subtle, it’s a choice.
I can also feel other as a Vietnamese person within my Vietnamese culture, so it’s not like you’re different from me. There are different ways that we can always feel different. And I want you to know, internally, my mind is switching all the time, and how hard it is.
Rumpus: What’s your relationship to stereotypes and writing? Was it something that was on your mind, or were you just like, “I’m going to do what I’m going to do and let the chips fall where they will”?
Lieu: I was just writing. Most of the time I would throw things against the wall, sauce splattered in my face, and I blindly crawled around the carpet. I didn’t know what I was doing at all, and—full transparency—a few months after the book deal, my editor was like, “Your writing sounds kind of schizophrenic” and I knew she wasn’t going to hold my hand because she’s a pretty established editor. After a few months, I did hire a book doctor. I interviewed four of them. And then I hired one. It’s not a ghostwriter. It was someone to support me, edit, and give feedback. I like interactive feedback. I’m a performer and I am a procrastinator, and I didn’t have a deadline, so I needed to be held accountable. Some writers I meet have an outline of a chapter or the point of their work—and I didn’t. I think there was so much trauma that I was looking at and uncovering that just starting to write was so scary because I’m a perfectionist too.
Rumpus: It’s so important for people to be thinking outside of the box when it comes to creating, and nobody’s writing a book by themselves, which I think is a common misconception. I feel like there’s a lot of pressure to write in your home alone without intervention. Everything you’re saying is going to be helping people open their minds to new ways to create.
Lieu: I would not be here without my book doctor. That’s a hidden cost in this age of how editors edit. I am not a natural writer. I did not call myself a writer. I once went to a mixer and someone introduced me as a playwright. I almost choked on my chicken bone. I was like, “What?” I’m always looking around feeling like I don’t know what I’m doing.
I had to have the courage to even tell my story and then the confidence to stick at it and say, “I deserve to do this and I’m going to make it the best that it can be.” Courage, confidence, and craft is what it comes down to at the end of the day. My director for 140 LBS used to say, “No one’s paying to see a rehearsal. Right?”
Rumpus: That’s brutal!
Lieu: But true! Then, I was so desperate to make money because my advance money got dry. We don’t talk as writers about how we can float ourselves to write.
Rumpus: Exactly. Today, so much of being able to keep writing is not about writing. And there is so little conversation about how you make money during the day to support your art. Most writers don’t make a livable wage from their written product, and that is something we should be chatting about more. In my opinion, finding ways to afford writing is causing more burn out than writer’s block.
Lieu: This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Yeah. And I was tired and burned out for a long time.
Rumpus: Right before a book launches, authors often tell me they’re burnt out or sick of the story, but I often find this new type of reengagement, like interviews and hearing from readings, can bring about a reenergizing that hopefully you will get.
Lieu: Recently, a woman who read my book for her book club sent me this long Instagram message. I asked, “What resonated for you in the book?” That’s always my invitation question. And then she said, “I’m a Jewish mother of three. I’ve had an eating disorder for two decades. I was hospitalized for a few months in fall of 2022. And I have a new body now, and I’ve been strongly considering plastic surgery, but I read your book. And you’ve saved my life because I know I can’t really change my body. But I can change this to be a good mother and a good wife while I’m alive.”
That’s life-giving to me.
Rumpus: I experienced a perfect balance of laughing out loud and crying my eyes out while reading this. As a comedian you’re obviously a funny person. Did you have an instinct to gloss over things with humor? Or were you able to sink into tougher places when you needed to?
Lieu: I got feedback from my book doctor and my editor saying, “This isn’t funny.” Part of me was trying to strive for being a historian and being accurate. And there’s the false idea I have of what it means to be a good writer, or what that writing should look like. I wrote it a certain way of what I thought a good writer would write like.
I think it took a while for me to believe in my voice and relax into it. Once I locked in the structure, I did another pass through to figure out how this could be kind of funny. At first, I think I was just too nervous. I was grasping, reaching for straws in the dirt. I had no idea.
So no, I don’t think it was more that I over-indexed the funny and then had to pull it back.
Rumpus: This title is perfect. And there’s nothing harder than coming up with a title. How and when did you know this was the title?
Lieu: One original title was Polished: The Price Pretty, but polished or polish looks like Polish the nationality. Also, this really isn’t about perfectionism. It touches on it, but it’s not really my main struggle. My main struggle is why do I feel insane in my family? Then I thought of The Manicurist’s Daughter, but there’s already some titles with daughters, so I was worried it was basic, but it’s right. It sets you in time. It creates the characters. You have an inkling that it’s about an immigrant story. It’s a perspective that we don’t really know too much about. It says a lot.
Rumpus: And the cover is so beautiful!
Lieu: Oh my god. My agent said that in her four decades of being an editor, she’s never gone through so many covers and so many graphs like graphic designers until mine. After many back and forths and conversations, she finally said, “I haven’t ever done this, but I’m going to show you all versions.” It was like eighty images.
Rumpus: Oh, my god, Susan, now that you’ve said this, everyone is going to be begging their editor for the file.
Lieu: So then I’m scrolling through, I see a whole bunch of belly iterations and a lot of Geisha faces with crying tears. Then there’s one picture smack in the middle unlike all the other ones, and when I saw it, I started crying because this looks like home—because this is what I would stare at all the time, all these posters of nails in the salon. All our business cards had this image in it. This felt like home.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Susan Lieu
