Susan Lieu Podcast Appearances
Moms Don’t Have Time To Read Books
with Zibby Owens
Susan joins Zibby Owens ("NYC's Most Powerful Book-fluencer" — Vulture) to discuss The Manicurist’s Daughter (and Zibby’s April Book Club Pick!).
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Lemonada’s Add to Cart
with Kulap Vilaysack & SuChin Pak
Susan joins the pod to create a trifecta of Asian Auntie shenanigans. It’s an emotionally raw conversation that will leave you hopeful that generational healing is just as real as the trauma.
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Glamorous Trash
with Chelsea Devantez
Chelsea is joined by Susan to explore “Love, Lucy,” the memoir of comedy icon Lucille Ball. They unpack Lucy’s rise to superstardom with “I Love Lucy,” her passionate and rocky romance with Desi Arnaz, and her relentless battles against sexism that drove her to break barriers—and a few car windows—along the way.
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Read. Talk. Grow.
from The Mayo Clinic
A Mayo clinic professor and anesthesiologist reviews what happened during Susan’s mother's plastic surgery to unpack the 5 questions you should ask before a major surgery that could save your life. Listen for practical tips on how to advocate for yourself and your loved ones in the very intimidating healthcare setting.
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Grief Out Loud
from The Dougy Center
Susan chats with Jana DeCristofaro from The Dougy Center, a Portland-based group supporting grieving kids, teens, and young adults. Susan reflects on how their resources are what she wished for after her mother’s tragic death. Together, they explore grief’s many facets, including its unexpected joys.
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They Call Us Bruce
with Jeff Yang and Phil Yu
Susan discusses grief, trauma, body image, her family's unwillingness to discuss what happened, and her attempts to find acceptance and purpose elsewhere — including what turned out to be a cult. A yoga cult. Also: The Good, The Bad, and The WTF of writing The Manicurist's Daughter.
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What About…? Podcast
with Danny Nucci and Jason M. Burns
Danny Nucci and Jason M. Burns take a long look at themselves in the mirror as they explore the topic of body image with Susan.
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Critical Literary Consumption
with Anna Nguyen
Join Anna Nguyen as she sits down with Susan. In capturing life as a Vietnamese American daughter in California during the 1990s, Lieu reflects on her cultural-specific references in The Manicurist’s Daughter, dialogue in Vietnamese, and her knowingly othering the reader.
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The Premise
with Jennifer Thompson
Join Anna Nguyen as she sits down with Susan. In capturing life as a Vietnamese American daughter in California during the 1990s, Lieu reflects on her cultural-specific references in The Manicurist’s Daughter, dialogue in Vietnamese, and her knowingly othering the reader.
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Deborah Kobylt LIVE
with Deborah Kobylt
Deborah Zara KobyIt (CNN, Fox11 Los Angeles, KCAL9 News) sits down with Susan for a chat about The Manicurist’s Daughter and Susan’s one-woman theatrical show, 140 Pounds: How Beauty Killed My Mother.
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Jelly Pops Book Club
with Julia Washington
Susan talks with zesty and insightful host Julia Washington about a smorgasbord of subjects including, “putting on my big girl pants to face all my trauma before becoming a mother.” Plus, who would Susan cast to play herself in a screen adaptation of The Manicurist’s Daughter?
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RISK! Podcast (Fright)
Hosted by Kevin Allison
Craig Conant, Susan Lieu, and Heather Minter share stories about a drug raid, a daughter’s grief, and a frightening time on a Christian mission.
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Bitch Talk
with Erin Lim and Angela Tabora
Tender tears and cackling laughter with Erin and Angela, co-hosts of "Bitch Talk" where Susan dishes on grappling with distorted memory, the divisive term "chosen family," and how loving my body includes squeezing my belly fat at night.
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A Bookish Home
with Laura Szaro Kopinski
In Susan’s first interview with a librarian, she shares the 3 most important takeaways from the book, how she avenged her mother’s death when she found out her negligent surgeon passed away, memoirs that have inspired her as a writer, and recent books she’s been reading that she highly recommends.
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I Dare You
with Darren Johnson
On "I Dare You Podcast," Darrin Johnson hones in on Susan's creative pivot to go from a management consultant to a storyteller on intergenerational healing. Susan reveals what was at stake and all the ways her memoir has been received that surprised her.
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How I Made My Mind
with Sah Pham
In this raw and deeply personal conversation, playwright and author Susan Lieu opens up losing her mom, who died of plastic surgery when she was 11 years old, and her two-decades search for meaning, answers, and healing. This is an episode about finding light in the darkest corners of life, confronting trauma head-on, and being relentless, curious, and unstoppable in the pursuit of healing and love.
I Don’t Know How You Do It
with Jessica Fein
Susan shares her journey of uncovering long-buried family secrets after her mother's death from a botched tummy tuck. As the daughter of Vietnamese refugees and a self-described "multi-hyphenate storyteller," Susan reveals how she transformed decades of silence into art.
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The Ampersand Manifesto
Multi-Passionate People Dive Deep with Jessica Wan
We all have Ampersand identities, some that take the forefront at different phases in our lives. For Susan, she’s a Multihyphenate Storyteller, Chocolatier, & "Cool" Mom (thanks Amy Poehler from "Mean Girls"!). She weaves her most recent epiphany that the purpose of her life is to nourish herself with her values.
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Healing the Tigress
with Peggy & Jasmine
Peggy and Jasmine talk with Susan about how losing her mother at a young age was such a pivotal event in her life, that everything going forward went through the sieve of her mother's death, especially while she was becoming a mother herself.
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Asian America
the Ken Fong Podcast
After her 30-something manicurist mother died from a botched tummy-tuck surgery, Susan was met with a wall of silence from all her relatives. This led to years and years of battles with her weight and self-esteem. But she eventually learns to push back hard against the body-shaming voices around her and inside her head.
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Reply Yeochin
with Ellen Acuario & Jane Park
The Yeochins welcome Susan Lieu, Vietnamese American author, activist, and performer, to the podcast to discuss her riveting memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter. The book is a refreshingly honest and raw memoir about Susan’s quest to find answers and heal after her mother dies during plastic surgery.
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A Place of Yes
A Grief Podcast hosted by Heather Straughter
In this episode, Susan opens up about losing her mother to a botched surgery at age 11, uncovering the secrets no one wanted to talk about, and how she found strength in the messiness of grief and resilience. It’s raw, authentic, and a conversation you don’t want to miss.
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The Yellow Chair Collective
An Asian American Mental Health Podcast with Helen Garcia
In this conversation, Helen Garcia and Susan Lieu explore family trauma and how to heal from generational family wounds.
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The Only One in the Room
with Laura Cathcart Robbins
Susan shares her poignant quest to avenge her mother's death caused by a negligent plastic surgeon, leading her to create a one-woman show and memoir.
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Write-Minded
with Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner
Susan shares about how her mother became the central force and inspiration for her work after she died. In the process of writing about her mother and making sense of what happened, Susan discovered so much about her family’s silence, their trauma, and about her living parent—her father.
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BONUS READ: Susan Lieu on Not Letting the Past Stay in the Past
Mad Rush
with Trisha Addicks
What does sorority life and my life story have in common? The deep human need to belong and feel seen. Susan shares how our "chosen family" can get us through hard times, how body image and childhood trauma can warp your world, and how the key to profound connection is through the simple (and lost) art of listening.
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Grief is a Sneaky Bitch
with Lisa Keefauver
In this episode we explore the complexities of grief beliefs shaped by family dynamics, the silence surrounding loss, and the impact of cultural context on mourning. Susan shares her profound journey of grief, justice, and self-discovery following the death of her mother.
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My Simplified Life
with Michelle Glogovac
Michelle and Susan explore Susan's journey of uncovering her mother's story, the importance of intergenerational healing, and the challenges of self-discovery and motherhood.
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The Second Degree Society
with Emily Merrell
Susan shares her journey of turning intergenerational trauma into art and healing, her reflections on resilience as a first-generation Vietnamese-American, and the lessons she's learned from chasing success while staying true to herself.
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Let’s Talk Memoir
with Ronit Plank
Susan Lieu joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about realizing you’re an artist later in life, feeling plagued by structure, writing residencies, writing down goals, grief journeys, storytelling as closure, and her new memoir The Manicurist’s Daughter.
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The Empowered and Embodied Show
with Kim Romain & Louise Neil
Through humor, vulnerability, and bold insights, this conversation explores self-worth beyond achievement, the importance of having "salad friends" (the ones who tell you when you have spinach in your teeth), and why true healing starts with looking inward.
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Craving more Susan magic?
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