In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Sarah Wang’s novel New Skin is a debut filled with dark humor and a powerfully poignant coming-of-age story.
BOMB wrote of the book:
“In her debut novel New Skin, Sarah Wang renders a mother-daughter relationship with startling intensity and dark wit…Reflecting on the body as a site of history and expression, the performance of vulnerability, and the layered histories embedded in Los Angeles, Wang’s New Skin introduces a sharp, and often humorous, voice attuned to contradiction, where intimacy is as perilous as it is sustaining.”
In her own words, here is Sarah Wang’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel New Skin:
Fade Into You (Mazzy Star)
The protagonist of my novel, Linli, is obsessed with her mother Fanny, a botched plastic surgery addict. Linli’s love for her mother is, in a sense, overdetermined. What she impossibly longs for is to truly understand and be close to her mother, to fade into her, to hold the hand inside her.
New Skin (Siouxie and the Banshees)
Fanny has had every procedure under the sun, enough facelifts and nose jobs to rival the most operated-on Kardashian. This Siouxie classic is Fanny’s theme song, “Fuck you I win this prize /Stardom pardons the lies,” which I imagine her singing as she competes with other botched plastic surgery victims on the reality competition show America’s Beauty Extreme. “Rising from the ashes and grime /A new me on the other side.” It’s no fun to deny what you desire. What if you went all the way, and then a little further?
Wrong (Everything but the Girl)
Apologies, apologies… this is a song about betrayal, admitting your wrongs, repair, and devotion. It ends with “wherever you go, I will follow you ‘cause I was wrong.” This tracks the arc of Linli and Fanny’s relationship to each other, despite all the sabotage and damage they’ve waged in their private war.
Species of the Pod (Drexciya)
Drexciya is the ne plus ultra of matriarchal music. For those who don’t know, Drexciya is an underwater world populated by pregnant mothers who were thrown off ships during Transatlantic slave trades. In Drexciya’s mythology, the mothers gave birth in the ocean and thus an entire world thrives there. All of the music is made by Drexciyans and for Drexciyans. Mommy underwater techno? Yes, please.
You’re No Good (ESG)
This song is for driving down Pacific Coast Highway at four in the morning flicking the headlights on and off. Linli does it but you should not. (Unless you’re doing it in your nightmares, in which case—godspeed.)
Skulls (Misfits)
Have you ever done Misfits karaoke? I have. So has Linli. She sings “Skulls” in a Chinese karaoke parlor called Sing Sing after getting a horrendous makeover. She shouts the lyrics of the punk song “hack the heads off little girls and put ‘em on my wall” The song spites and scandalizes her mother, who ends up outdoing Linli when she sings her own demented song about a woman’s plight through prostitution and brothels.
The Ten Sighs (Teresa Tang)
Fanny’s embattling karaoke song is about an impoverished girl sold to a house of prostitution, then abused and abandoned by a man in adult life. The song uses the structure of ten sighs, each sigh representing an era of the woman’s life—betrayal, isolation, existential despair, each more dejected than the last. This song is the soundtrack for a Chinese film The Heart of a Fallen Woman, which is based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection.
Do I Ever Cross Your Mind? (Dolly Parton)
Linli’s boss at work, DB, is named after Dolly Parton. His mother, a number-one Dolly fan who sang all her greatest hits at karaoke while growing up in the Philippines, knew that she would get pregnant one fated night and that the baby would be named Dolly. In America, his parents decided that Dolly Bautista should be shortened to DB in the hopes of evading ridicule. In my opinion, this is a tragedy, and a form of whitewashing that immigrants often undertake when moving to the west. Dolly forever.
Carousel (Mr. Bungle)
New Skin is so demented, and so is Mr. Bungle. Deranged clown music produced by John Zorn, formed by the rejects of other bands, Mr. Bungle is layered, complex, unpredictable, and so California. Just like New Skin!
By Your Side (Sade)
As New Skin ends with love and devotion, so shall this playlist. Linli and Fanny are together again after all that’s happened between them and to them. They’ve survived near death experiences, more plastic surgery disasters than humanly possible, the gauntlet of reality TV, an FBI investigation, and most of all, the utter heartbreak of giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it: love.
Sarah Wang is the author of New Skin (Little Brown, 2026), which was named a best book by Apple Books, a favorite by NPR, a most anticipated book by Publisher’s Weekly and Debutiful, and was featured in the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, People, Dazed, and Bloomberg. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. Wang is a MacDowell Fellow, a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, a Sewanee Writer’s Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, a finalist for a Nelson Algren Prize, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College.