Natural Beauty A Novel

[Catherine Nicolo]

NaturalBeauty is a 2023 satirical horror novel by Ling Ling Huang that explores the intersection of beauty and wellness standards with social issues like classism, racism, and sexism. Her debut novel, it was published on April 4, 2023, by Dutton. It is in development for a television adaptation by eOne, to be co-produced by Constance Wu and Drew Comins.[1]

The unnamed protagonist is a young second-generation Chinese American woman whose narrative shifts between her childhood as a piano prodigy and her present time beginning work for a renowned beauty and wellness company.

Her parents are also talented pianists who immigrated to the United States from China immediately following the Cultural Revolution. After they are severely injured in a car crash, they must reside in a long-term care facility, and the protagonist's struggle to pay for this care drives her to leave music and seek paid work.

Her new job demands that she undertake escalating measures to conform to the aesthetic standards of the company, and she must eventually confront what horrors these standards entail, both personally and globally.

A New York Times review described the novel as "a meditation on vanity, the ways in which the pursuit of physical beauty can betray the other sources of beauty in one's life,"[2] while Publishers Weekly noted themes of "insidious Western standards, fears about bodily autonomy, and queer desire."[3]

In an interview with Vogue, Constance Wu said that "the themes of the beauty industry and beauty standards that we place upon women that are rooted in sexism, racism, classism" were part of what motivated her to option it for a television adaptation.[4]

Huang has traced the origin of the novel to her own experiences working in the beauty industry:[5] "Figuring out why I have visible pores and things that are totally normal started becoming exhausting, and that's when I realized I should take a closer look at why I've just accepted all of this as work I need to do."[4]

A Wired review lauded the novel as "a delightfully baroque grotesque,",[6] while a New York Times review said that its transition into horror felt jarring, but that Huang is "at her best when she skewers the narcissistic, corrosive version of self-care that can be mistaken for empowerment." Kirkus Reviews said the novel "ultimately moves too quickly to provide a satisfactory payoff on the many mysteries it lays out."[7]

The novel was among the New York Times Editors' Choice recommendations for new novels in April 2023.[8] It received starred reviews, marking it as exceptional, by Booklist[9] and Publishers Weekly.[3]

Natural Beauty is in development for a television adaptation by eOne.[1] It is to be co-produced by Constance Wu and Drew Comins, an executive producer for the television series Yellowjackets.[11]

Author and violinist Ling Ling Huang joins us to discuss her new novel, Natural Beauty, and the fraught nature of that term; how working in the clean-beauty and wellness space affected her eating-disorder recovery and her mental health; why she invested so much in wellness culture at a time in her life when she could barely afford food; the fetishization and appropriation of Asian cultures in wellness; and lots more.

Ling Ling Huang is a writer and violinist. She plays with several ensembles including the Music Kitchen, Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra, Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra, Shattered Glass, and Experiential Orchestra, with whom she won a Grammy award in 2021. Natural Beauty is her first novel. Learn more about her work at linglinghuang.com.

So Ling Ling, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be talking with you about your story and your book Natural Beauty, which I think listeners of this podcast will really resonate with. It's so and haunting and I just can't stop thinking about it, so I'm really excited for people to explore it and experience it for themselves. And I'd love to start off first by having you tell us about your history with wellness culture and sort of how you came to write this book.

Ling Ling Huang: Sure. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I am such a big fan of yours, so this is really wonderful. I was thinking about where my interest in wellness started, and it wasn't until I was reading The Wellness Trap that I really remembered. I had a friend who had, both of her parents had different kinds of cancers and I was 12 at the time when they were undergoing treatment, and of course now I know that they were going through chemotherapy and doing all the things that are suggested for cancer, but what they really glommed onto as having saved them both was this really intense restrictive diet. It changed their lifestyles and whenever I visited I would see all of these alternative medicines and things that they were trying that really stuck with me even though I didn't really start on my own wellness journey for many years.

That really affected me and I got really interested in clean beauty. I would say maybe eight to 10 years ago. It was a new field back then it felt like, and when I had the opportunity to work at a clean beauty and wellness store, it was kind of this, all of my interests aligned and I really was excited. I drank the Kool-Aid hard when I worked there for the first few months and slowly over time I started to just have too many questions to continue in that space and I feel like I'm still on a journey of unlearning a lot of the things that I learned there, and actually there was still so much Disinformation about the wellness culture in general that I felt like finally with The Wellness Trap, I kind of was able to see more clearly. So thank you for writing that. So that's kind of been my journey and it's a journey that continues trying to find wellbeing as you put it, and it's really fun and Intuitive now, which feels great.

Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's huge. I'm so glad The Wellness Trap was helpful to you. That's really awesome to hear. And yeah, I think it's like the Disinformation is so deeply embedded in wellness culture and when you've spent so much time in those spaces too, it can just be, there's just so many layers to unpick, I guess. And you've written too that you had your own history of an eating disorder and that working in the clean beauty and wellness space kind of tested your recovery, so I'm curious about how it affected your recovery and your mental health more generally.

Ling Ling Huang: So I had an eating disorder really badly when I was, I would say from 11 to maybe 15 or 16, and then I started recovering, but I felt like I still had it. A lot of the wellness industry really reminds me of the time when I was really religious, which I'm not religious anymore, but there is a focus on perfection that I feel like ends up bleeding into every level of your life. And so when I was religious, I felt like I was recovered. I'm supposed to be loved for who I am, but I was severely diluted. I had disordered eating and it was all part of becoming this perfect person who is religious, and I felt like that was coming back with the wellness industry stuff and especially at the store where I worked, a common entire meal would be bone broth and people weren't eating solid foods necessarily.

It was such a restricted diet. It's hard to talk about without triggers and hopefully I'm not saying anything that's triggering, but it just found it. Yeah, it really tested my recovery and I knew that I was going to have to be really on guard, and I feel like that actually helped me because I was drinking the Kool-Aid in other ways, putting things in my body on my skin that were not only completely unnecessary, but were probably harmful. I showed up once and some company was there giving shots in the butt, so I hadn't done any of my own research and I think of myself as someone who thinks critically, but I realized especially from books like The Wellness Trap, that there's so good at packaging everything so that you think that you're doing your own research, but actually it's really harmful. So I didn't even do that. I just showed up. I was like, yeah, we're getting shots in the butt. Of course this is a wellness company, this is clean beauty. I'm not going to question it. All of my peers are doing it. It seems really fun, let's do it. So things like that I look back on now and it's very interesting. I try not to have any judgment for myself, but yeah, it's fun to look back.

Christy Harrison: And it's so easy to get sucked into those things too. I think in that kind of peer pressure environment where everybody's doing it, it seems like it's sanctioned by the company, it's like, sure, this is going to be great. And I'm curious if you remember what those shots were supposed to do and if there was anything there that was really compelling to you.

Christy Harrison: That is so fascinating and that unregulated nature of all of it is just really scary to me too. I wrote in The Wellness Trap about the supplement industry and how unregulated largely unregulated that industry is, and I really think supplements have a lot more in common with drugs than they do with food, even though they're regulated as food where they're not tested for safety and efficacy before they go to market, and sometimes they actually do have drugs in them, like pharmaceutical drugs or even illegal drugs in them, undisclosed. And so that feels so terrifying now, but yet earlier in my life I also really bought into supplements and took a lot of things seemingly for, I have multiple chronic health issues, so it's always popping something for immunity or fatigue or joint pain or whatever it might be. And yeah, it's so seductive and especially like you mentioned without health insurance, I think there's that added layer of it where it's like there's sort of this economic incentive to do those things that might be cheaper and more accessible than actually going to the doctor or taking pharmaceuticals.

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