'New Skin' and the botched quest for beauty
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NPR
4.7 • 9.2K Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2026
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
For Linli, the protagonist of the book New Skin, this is her reality: her mom Fanny has gone through so many back-alley plastic surgery procedures, Fanny’s face barely looks human anymore. When Fanny gets the opportunity to go on a reality TV show for the chance to fix her botched face, she jumps at it – and Linli tags along. But what happens when you can’t recognize your parent anymore? And what would achieving the perfect face really help?
Brittany chats with author Sarah Wang about New Skin, immigration and intergenerational trauma, and our botched quests for beauty.
For more episodes about parent relationships or beauty culture, check out:
Why some families stop speaking
The morbid lifelessness of modern beauty
The beauty industry has an Epstein problem
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sarah, in your opinion, what is the most undersung, most slept on reality TV show in the history of reality shows? |
| 0:11.3 | Can my answer be actually a documentary? |
| 0:14.5 | Go for it. |
| 0:15.6 | Okay. |
| 0:16.8 | So, Holy Hell is a documentary about a cult. |
| 0:22.5 | So the cult leader himself got different plastic surgery procedures. |
| 0:28.3 | But he wanted to see what different things would look like on different people first, before he got it. |
| 0:34.4 | What? |
| 0:35.2 | That's wild. |
| 0:36.1 | I mean, that's kind of like maybe like a new school version of getting your guard to eat your food to make sure it's not poison. I'll say that's very different for my answer. For me, it's Married to Medicine on Bravo. I feel people focus on the housewives and the summer houses and like the vanderpump of it all. But I love married to |
| 0:56.7 | medicine. And I'll say it's a show that's very true to its title. It centers on women in |
| 1:00.6 | Atlanta who either are doctors or are married to doctors. But do not let the basic premise fool |
| 1:05.9 | you. This show is so good. And it's because the relationships on the show began so organically. |
| 1:13.5 | Like many of these women were friends with each other, some for like decades before the show starts. |
| 1:18.7 | So when their conflicts actually happen, they happen organically. |
| 1:22.8 | And when they pay off, like it feels real, no matter how campy and ridiculous the show can get. And I'll say that |
| 1:29.8 | idea that reality television can offer catharsis, despite its obvious manufacturing, is at the |
| 1:35.3 | center of the debut novel from Sarah Wang called New Skin. New Skin just came out on May 12th and |
| 1:42.7 | opens with 26-year-old Linley Fang. |
| 1:45.6 | She's back home in Los Angeles for a few days. |
| 1:47.9 | She's reluctantly taking care of her mom, Fannie, who is recovering from an infection in her face, |
| 1:53.6 | brought on by way too many back-alley plastic surgeries. |
... |
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