I’m still trying to put words together after reading Susan Lieu’s memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter. It’s left me speechless and heartbroken, with its beautiful, poignant, and profound prose, it is one of the most amazing memoirs I’ve read. It’s rare for a book to make me cry, and this one still has me sobbing. The way Susan reconstructed her family history and intergenerational trauma was an incredible journey to experience, with many highs and lows. I was in awe of how well Susan captured her perception of her family and it slowly transformed as she learned more about them and herself through the creation of her show 140 Lbs. This memoir will stay with me for a long time! Know that it will grab your heart and not let it go with its food dishes, family dilemmas, and raw stories of growth and resilience. It’s a must-read!

The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu is a raw and real memoir. The author is open and honest as she shares her life as the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants who are working hard to survive. I applaud her for opening the door to let the reader see inside her family and her Asian culture. We follow her family’s adjustment to life in the United States and see the dedication of her mother, the family matriarch, as she opens nail salons to make a living.

When Susan is 11 years old, her mother dies following a plastic surgery procedure. Key topics are addressed head-on: the quest for physical beauty, a family’s survival following the mother’s death, and the pull of tradition and heritage. The writing is excellent and yet heartbreaking at times.

Published March 13, 2024.

This was a great story of the love and bond between a mother and daughter. It also addresses how the loss of some has a ripple effect on those all around them. Thank you @NetGalley for the opportunity to receive an advanced readers copy of The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu. #TheManicuristsDaughter #NetGalley

The Manicurist's Daughter: A Memoir | Susan Lieu | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

11-year old Susan lost her mother to a botched plastic surgery and the negligence of a surgeon.

A couple of degrees from Harvard & Yale; a happy marriage to a handsome man who can cook has not been able to fill the mother-sized hole in her heart or alleviate the weight of grief and trauma from her heart.

The Manicurist's Daughter is Susan Lieu's gritty, honest and soul-stirring journey of seeking closure, knowing her mother and discovering herself in the process.

The youngest of four, Susan, had always known her mother to be a formidable, empowering woman and the steering force of the family.
As a woman who had fled the absolutist Communist regime in Vietnam with undying pluck, tenacity & hope; established a successful nail salon chain in a foreign land and ensured a secure life for her family, she is the typical picture of tough love and discipline that so many of us Asian kids are used to.

While it discusses the hardships and trials of growing up as a first generation bilingual BIPOC American, admonishes a culture that perpetuates unhealthy body image standards; this memoir is primarily about processing and coping with grief and unresolved emotions.

I love how Lieu's simple, lucid prose is so effective in bringing her family's story to life; how I personally became involved in Lieu's journey and all in about 300 pages I came to understand, empathize and have tremendous respect for a woman I found it difficult to garner sympathy for, initially.

What I also appreciated is how food has come up time and again, not only to add an almost palpable deliciousness to the narrative but also has been masterfully used as an instrument to trace the past and stories of displacement and adaptation of the Vietnamese diaspora.

While it introduced me to a new culture, it also felt very familiar, very personal and resonated deeply with this daughter of traditional, hardworking middle-class Indian parents who has often found it difficult to balance between her western education, lifestyle and her Indian upbringing.

And for the first time in a long time @susanlieu made me feel I am not alone in my journey.

Beautiful, devastating, REAL, heartbreaking, and at times, funny, memoir. I had the special treat of seeing Susan Lieu's one-woman show before reading The Manicurist's Daughter. This will stay with me for a long time. <3

- If you’re a lover of memoirs exploring intergenerational trauma, THE MANICURIST’S DAUGHTER is one you can’t miss.
- Lieu’s to-the-point writing brings all her pain to the surface as we follow her trying both to figure out who she is an who her family members are as well.
- As Lieu’s understanding of and empathy for her family members’ individual grief processes grows, we begin to see a portrait of a family doing its best to hold on to each other even as they’ve experienced the worst the world has to offer.

This was an incredibly moving memoir. Susan’s writing was relatable, emotional, and beautiful. Her story is heartbreaking, but one worth sharing. You can feel the healing journey this has taken her on and the writing is so honest that it feels sometimes like I’m reading a private diary.

There is a lot of talk about body image, especially how this affects Susan her entire life, so I do stress anyone who reads this to be aware of this before reading.

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Thank you so much to Netgalley and Susan for this ARC!

I was drawn to this memoir because of the title. As someone who often frequents nail salons, I wanted to understand the world that facilitates it. Instead, I got a heart-breaking, honest, moving, and unique perspective of the immigrant and refugee communities keeping the nail salons in business. I constantly felt for Susan as she tried to get her family to talk about grief, and I wanted to give her the biggest hug. To see her own growth and her family's growth over 20+ years was powerful, and I wanted to get an update on where they are now. This memoir is one of a kind.

Absolutely riveting, raw, stunning, emotional memoir. I am obsessed with memoirs as I learn so much about life, and this one is now at the top of my list.

This memoir is a lot to unpack (in a good way)! Susan Lieu focuses on the death of her mother from complications caused by cosmetic surgery when Susan, the youngest child was only eleven. As she gets older, she wants to know more about what happened to her mother but finds her family to be tight-lipped as they accuse Susan of stirring up unnecessary pain and encourage her to drop her inquiries. But Susan persists into adulthood, her marriage and becoming a mother herself while she creatively turns her mother’s story into a solo drama performance with the added benefit of processing her own grief and helping her family with theirs.
This book addresses so many themes that I will probably accidentally leave out some important pieces. I learned so many things about the Vietnamese culture! Susan was born in the USA after the rest of her family immigrated to find a better life. Her mother was ambitious and was successful in opening two nail salons in Northern California. The cultural aspect of body image and thinness played a big part in the surgeon’s preying on vulnerable Vietnamese women. Until Susan firmly rebuked her family’s fat-shaming, she also fell victim to this to a lesser degree. The family dynamics were also very interesting in regards to roles and dealing with the mother’s death. I found the concept of channeling and speaking to the deceased as well as the death rituals fascinating. And Susan’s persistence in investigating the surgeon and traveling to Vietnam to put the story together and then bringing everything together with her creative endeavors was inspiring!

I appreciate this book for what it is. I respect Lieu's experience and the way she displays her feelings and grief. I liked the clever uses of language. But with that being said, I found myself bored. The way she talks about her family makes them sound truly insufferable at times because they were downright cruel.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Celadon for this moving and complex memoir. I appreciate the review copy and chance to reflect on Susan Lieu's story, her mother's story. This book made me slow down, think about the lives I interact with in general ways, of the pathways that lead us to connect, even briefly, and if those pathways are intentional, filled with hope and/or loss, and if those are pathways truly wanted. And it moved me to appreciate all that I have done in my work life to amplify unhealthy messages about body image, the sociocultural pressures that women navigate and how those intersect in complex ways with race, ethnicity, context... At the heart of this memoir is also a loving tribute to a mother, a refusal to ignore the body image themes, and to take this story of loss and make it a story about so many lives, feelings, and experiences.

"...when Ma died, when my sun fell out of the sky, she was thirty-eight years old. I was eleven. After that, my family was never the same."

The Manicurist’s Daughter is a memoir that explores themes of grief, forgiveness and discovery of the self. If you enjoyed Crying in H Mart, you will like this book.

The story follows Susan and her Vietnamese family and explores the struggles they endure for being immigrants as well as losing the driven matriarch in their lives unexpectedly. Susan was very young when her mother died due to a tummy tuck procedure gone wrong.

The family is emotionally absent and this could be because they had to be in survival mode all the time to get where they wanted to be. Now an adult, the protagonist has hit a block in her life and is unable to make any meaningful connections to anything and is kind of just floating through everything. She realizes one day that the reason for her struggles, is that she hasn't made peace with her loss.

The Manicurist's Daughter is a poignant memoir of a daughter exploring the loss of her mother, and reconnecting with her family who never shared their feelings about the tragedy. It is a very well done memoir. Kudos.

This memoir was a unique one for me to read. Reading about how Susan and her family would try channeling their family’s matriarch- who was lost during a routine cosmetic surgical procedure when Susan was only 11- was so interesting, as was learning all the spiritual beliefs she and her Vietnamese family hold. I also felt so sorry for this young girl, and just wanted to hold her and give her the comfort that poor child desperately needed. Despite all of Susan’s hardships, though, she becomes an amazing, strong woman, who stands up to her family’s outdated ideals of beauty (an ideal which ultimately lead to her mother’s passing).

This memoir was real, honest, and not afraid to pull the punches. It takes courage for someone to write out their whole life story especially when it might not paint their family (both alive and deceased) in the best light. But that’s what makes this book so beautiful.

Thanks NetGalley, Celadon Books, and Macmillan Audio for the ARC and ALC of this book!

Susan Lieu is the daughter of immigrants who came to California in the 80s from Vietnam. Her mother was a strong force in the family and opened up two nail salons that the family worked together. Her mother passed away when Susan was 11 years old after a botched plastic surgery. Susan wanted to know more about her mother but her family refused to discuss it after her death. She went on a journey to discover who her mother was and to look into the surgeon who operated on her that terrible day.

I loved reading about Vietnam and the culture. I felt terrible for the way her family treated her and wouldn’t open up about her mother. Her mother died getting a tummy tuck and somehow they felt it was okay to call her fat 🤯 It was a raw, honest and heartbreaking memoir that was well written. It could have been cut a little shorter but it is definitely worth a read!

I really enjoy reading memoirs, especially ones like this. They are interesting, informative, educational and show us a way of life that may be very different than our own. They are just fun to read. But often they are equally hard to read. That different way of life is often difficult, challenging, sometimes dangerous. The people who survive and write these memoirs are inspirational. And insightful. Their memories are nuanced, mixing the trauma they had to endure with the joy of that long-ago life. Sometimes they are bitter, and it may take many years to find peace.

Susan Lieu describes a life in The Manicurist’s Daughter that is simply fascinating. I could vividly picture that little girl solemnly and industriously carrying out her assigned duties and bearing a lot of responsibility for such a young child.

But her mother? Pretty terrifying. In the author’s words, “She had the master plan, leading with the omniscience of Oz, the high expectations of Confucius, and the charm of Princess Diana.” Pretty strong force and one you’re unlikely to pit yourself against, especially when you are just a young girl. And not someone whose mind you could change or whose motivations you could understand.

There is so much to absorb in this book, the author covers so much: family history and hierarchy, tradition, grief, body image, food, class, race. Fitting in a strange world that isn’t always accepting. And at the heart of the book, the author’s long-time struggle to understand her mother’s need for plastic surgery, and her own need to find peace with it, to stop wanting to punish the plastic surgeon, even if he deserves it, even if he is now dead.

As always, Celadon Books are the best; they publish a variety of fiction and non-fiction that will always satisfy. The Manicurist’s Daughter is strong, compelling, eye-opening, heartbreaking and author Susan Lieu makes you experience that different world and also the world of the child in all of us who just misses their mother. Thanks to Celadon Books for providing an advance copy of The Manicurist’s Daughter as a Celadon Reader via NetGalley. I couldn’t put it down and recommend it without hesitation. I voluntarily leave this review; all opinions are my own.

As a Vietnamese diaspora memoir, The Manicurist Daughter is unique in that it not only captures Susan Lieu’s journey of grief and healing from the inter-generational traumas that are all too common when you’re the child of refugees, but also from her mother’s death from a botched plastic surgery procedure. Lieu uses the latter to criticize the beauty standards that are imposed upon Vietnamese women…

Read the rest of my review at the attached link.

The Manicurist’s Daughter- a touching memoir about self discovery and family after the loss of her mother from a botched up surgery. Susan goes on her quest to find out what happened to her mother, figure out how deal with her mom’s death at such a young age, and how to find closure. As a first generation Chinese American, I found her story so relatable as far as growing up with immigrant parents. I enjoyed learning about her Vietnamese culture with hints of Chinese culture as well- especially all the talk about comforting foods! It also touches on so many other important issues that affect immigrants and refugees and the impact of the “need to be beautiful” in this world. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

As a fellow 2nd generation daughter of Vietnamese refugees, I had an inkling this would be an enjoyable and resonating read, but I did not anticipate that this would feel like a therapy session.

The format of this memoir was engaging, easy to follow and very intentional. It made a lot of sense that Susan devoted a lot of time and attention in sharing her parent's and particularly her mom's backstory. As a reader, this kind of background information is crucial in understanding how intergenerational trauma is formed and transmitted from one generation to subsequent ones. It was painful, relatable and heartwrenching to see Susan dig into her family's history and learn just how much of her mother's decision-making, personality and beliefs were shaped by her upbringing and traumatic life events. As someone who also has a fraught, complicated relationship with her mom, I felt motivated to ask her similar questions to understand more about how her life came to be the way it was.

This was a beautiful, heartwrenching homage to Susan's mother that made me cry, think deeply and feel so very seen.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

4.5⭐️

The Manicurist’s Daughter is a fascinating and moving memoir of grief, family, and the search for truth. I was held in thrall from the first page to the last, as Susan explored what drove her mother, from her determined struggle to make it America in pursuit of a better life, to the eternal quest for beauty that proved her downfall. The effects rippled through Susan’s own life, and I felt honored to have her share this deeply personal story.

Thank you Susan Lieu, Celadon Books, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley and for providing this ARC for review consideration. All opinions expressed are my own.