This week, CalArts alum Sarah Wang (Critical Studies MFA 08) releases her debut novel, New Skin.
In the novel, Wang explores the dark side of Los Angeles’ cosmetic surgery industry through the story of an enmeshed mother-daughter relationship.
“I wanted to write about ugliness as a virtue and tell the story of two women who are as ingenious and cunning as they are fallible,” said Wang, in an interview with People.
Wang, who teaches writing at Barnard College in New York City, has published fiction, essays, and reviews in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, and BOMB, among many other publications. Her writing across genres focuses on mass incarceration, psychoanalysis, surveillance, colonized bodies, contemporary art, class, race, and feminism.
In New Skin, Wang brings many of these themes into a story inspired by her experiences living in Los Angeles and her own relationship with her mother. The novel follows Linli Feng, a 26-year-old who returns home to Los Angeles to care for her aging mother, Fanny, whose plastic surgery addiction has taken a dangerous turn. Linli must navigate an FBI investigation while trying to save her mother from the underground beauty industry after Fanny lands on a reality television competition in which plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery.
“The question at the book’s core asks how we become the people we are. The secrets we carry are the ones we are doomed to repeat,” Wang told People.
Publishers Weekly awarded New Skin a starred review, calling the novel “a bracing tale [that] goes much more than skin deep.”
Francisco Goldman, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy, called the novel “one of the indisputable masterpieces” of a new canon of American immigration fiction, while former CalArts faculty member and New York Times bestselling author Maggie Nelson described New Skin as “a truly original debut from a seriously intelligent writer.”
Wang will appear at Skylight Books (1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles) on Thursday, May 14 at 7 pm in conversation with author Chris Kraus to discuss New Skin.
By Audrey Tucker
