New Skin opens in a hospital waiting room, where, just a few pages in, Fanny Feng is receiving leech therapy on her botched nose. She’s accompanied by her daughter, the novel’s protagonist, Linli, who, after several years of estrangement, has been forced to return home to Los Angeles when her mother’s repeated plastic surgeries result in yet another medical complication. “The differing aesthetic goals of myriad doctors had made her face a battleground of warring ideals,” writes author Sarah Wang. “I scanned her face, the entire thing immobile from years of Botox injections. Useless. It was impossible to take inventory in a landscape that was constantly shifting.”

Fanny, a first-generation immigrant from Taiwan, has been addicted to cosmetic procedures for years, getting illegal treatments of all kinds in LA’s underground beauty industry. Along with altering her face beyond recognition, the treatments have also tarnished Fanny’s relationship with her daughter, who struggles to understand her mother’s obsession with image. When Fanny wins a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a new reality TV show where botched plastic surgery addicts compete for the prize of reconstructive surgery, it seems like an opportunity to right some of her wrongs. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that, like many of her elective treatments, the show is something very different from what Fanny thought she was signing up for. 

Despite the frequent cosmetic appointments and name-dropping of beauty jargon, New Skin is not your average wellness critique novel, or even really one at all. Throughout the book, Wang’s preoccupation is not with mocking the beauty industry or even vanity itself, but with using beauty as a vehicle for understanding agency, identity and the realities of the American Dream. 

Below, the author discusses her Los Angeles upbringing, rewriting common immigrant narratives and more.

Congrats on publishing your debut novel! What was the original inspiration behind the book? It’s such an original idea. 

Sarah Wang: I grew up in LA, and I think plastic surgery was in the air in some way, although it was really different when I was growing up. It was relegated mostly to Hollywood back then, and older ladies that you would see, who had a very classic, Joan Rivers pulled face. For me, [New Skin] was more about the idea of what happens when somebody who you’re closest to in the world betrays you in some way. It’s all a metaphor. I use the surface of the face to talk about the most familiar face in the world becoming unrecognisable, and what do you do with that? How do you live with that? How do you reconcile a kind of betrayal from a parent from a very young age?

Throughout the novel, there are references to beauty treatments like stem cell placenta injections and infrared bionic laser pulsing. How much of the procedures in the book are real versus fictionalised, and how did you go about researching the world of beauty treatments? 

Sarah Wang: Because this is not exactly my world, I had to do a lot of research, and it’s pretty easy nowadays because there’s so many (coming from Korea, it seems) of all these innovative, new technologies and treatments. The first time I heard about it was from a friend who had gone to Korea and went to one of these cosmetic procedure places. She was telling me that she got a salmon skin DNA treatment, and I was like, ‘What is this? That’s so wild’. And then I started researching it.

But I fictionalised a lot in the novel. I changed names. I didn’t want to base anything too heavily on anything real, but of course, it’s all very similar. Laser treatments, these different injections that you’re getting – it all sounds pretty sci-fi and futuristic and unbelievable anyway, which is very in line with the absurdist nature of my book, so it seemed to fit pretty perfectly.

The book is as much about  mother-daugher relationships as it is about beauty ideals. What about that dynamic interests you as an author?

Sarah Wang: I’ve grown up with a single mother, and having a really close relationship is very intimately familiar to me, that kind of intensely close, and also intensely too close relationship. I hope readers take away that while it’s pretty obvious that the enmeshment is painful, and often stands in the way of [Linli and Fanny] maybe doing other things with their life or expanding their world beyond the confines of this intense house, it’s also very beautiful and special because of how well they know and love each other.

The paradox of the American dream is also a major tenet in the book; no matter how hard Linli or her mother tries, the system is still stacked against them. What were you trying to say about the immigrant experience through these two characters, especially given their different generations? 

Sarah Wang: I think this book, above and beyond all, is an immigrant story. Immigrants obviously aren’t a monolith, and each immigrant story has a different set of concerns and difficulties that they’re each dealing with. Fanny, for example, her main concern is how she looks, thinking about looks and beauty in a really kind of old-school way, beauty as a meritocracy, almost. So does the character Ami, who’s a first-generation immigrant too, although she’s much younger. They think, ‘If I look good, if I look a certain way, then I can achieve all these things.’

And so that’s the first generation, versus Linli, a second-generation immigrant who actually doesn’t really care about how she looks. For her, what’s most important is having a purpose and education. I’m definitely not saying one is right and one is wrong, but these are just the different concerns each generation thinks are important just by virtue of their different experiences.

What drew you to writing about these extremes?

Sarah Wang: I’m interested in extremes as a way to counteract these kinds of immigrant good girl narratives in fiction and in media. I think for a long time there’s been this belief that we have to be good, we have to behave, and that’s the way that we’re going to succeed or be accepted. I think I’ve always rebelled against that in my own life, and especially in this book, I didn’t want my characters to be quiet or to marry well.. I wanted them to be ugly, to be extreme, to be loud, to basically be afforded the kind of agency to behave any way that anyone else does in fiction and in real life. Everybody should be able to make mistakes, and why should we, as immigrants, be held to a different standard of having to be exceptional?

Along with exploring extreme beauty, you also explore reality TV’s dark underbelly. How did that world make its way into the novel?

Sarah Wang: Reality TV was another aspect of this kind of extremity that I wanted to push in the novel. Yeah, it’s already extreme that Fanny’s botched to the point of disfiguration. But what if she went on TV and wasn’t so ashamed that she hid in her house all day, but actually did the exact opposite? What if she not only went on TV to show her face but also, in that strange, surreal world of reality TV and performance, ironically finds community and some kind of acceptance through this extreme form?

What do you want audiences to take away from New Skin?

Sarah Wang: I teach, and one of the lessons I teach is about how to use writing as an act of bearing witness, how writing can be political, and how fiction can be political. I think for me, all of my writing functions in that way. New Skin, for me, is a political novel, a novel of disobedience, a novel of protest and using this arena of reality TV and plastic surgery to talk about deeper issues of assimilation, of poverty, of debt, of non-nuclear family structures, of community and how to heal. And so, I would really love readers to come for the botched plastic surgery and stay for all the other deeper issues.