The Manicurist’s Daughter: A Memoir

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.