The Manicurist's Daughter

January 15, 2024
Playwright Lieu delivers a stirring debut memoir focused on the fallout from her mother’s untimely death in 1996. Dividing the account into six sections, each corresponding to different meanings of the Vietnamese word ma (“Mother,” “Ghost,” “Tomb,” “But,” “Newborn Rice Seedling,” and “Horse”), Lieu traces her anguish across decades and continents. The youngest of four children, and the only one born in the U.S., Lieu grew up helping her Vietnamese mother, Hà Thi (or “Jennifer” to her American clients) operate several nail salons in Northern California. When Hà Thi died suddenly after receiving an abdominoplasty from a surgeon with a history of malpractice, 11-year-old Lieu was set adrift. She took multiple trips to Vietnam as a young adult, attempting to understand her mother within the contexts of both the country’s history and her own family. She also consulted mediums and old family recipes in attempts to conjure her late mother’s spirit. After settling back in the U.S., Lieu wrote and performed an autobiographical play that fostered dialogue about Hà Thi among her mostly tight-lipped relatives, and helped ease tensions between Lieu and her often-harsh father. Lieu’s candor about her mother’s faults (body-shaming chief among them) and righteous anger at the surgeon who killed her set this apart from similar fare. It’s a generous portrait of grief that will touch those who’ve struggled with loss. Agent: Monika Verma, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary.

May 31, 2024

When Lieu was 11, she lost her mother, who died during an elective plastic surgery procedure. With her death, Lieu and her family also lost their fiery center, around whom a successful chain of nail salons orbited. For years, as the business empire shuttered and Lieu left California to study at Harvard, she tried to navigate the grief with her older siblings and father, but the subject was viewed as unseemly "dirty laundry" and her open bereavement as weakness. This superbly self-narrated debut memoir traces the steps Lieu took, both brave and foolhardy, to try and find peace with that sudden, senseless death. Her award-winning one-woman show, 140 Lbs: How Beauty Killed My Mother, helped break through her family's silence and certainly informs her performance as a narrator. Using affect and accent, Lieu gives distinct voices to family members in the U.S. and Vietnam, including a creepy cult recruiter, psychics and spiritual mediums of various backgrounds, her child self, and, of course, her mother. VERDICT Candidly exploring her relationship with her mother in life as well as the shattering effect of her death, Lieu's memoir is highly recommended.--Lauren Kage

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