“When the stranger’s face arrived to occupy my mother’s body, it shocked the language out of me,” recalls Linli, the 26-year-old narrator of Sarah Wang’s debut novel, New Skin (May 12, Little, Brown). The stranger was her mother, Fanny, transformed by a face-lift and a nose job. Linli was 8 years old, and she was so disturbed that she regressed: Her grades slipped, and she stopped speaking. “I recoiled when she came near me.”

A spate of new fiction and TV is making room for an underexplored perspective: that of the families and partners of plastic surgery patients. Parents, lovers, children and friends bristle at seeing their loved ones eliminate familiar quirks — and, with them, evidence of a shared history. In New Skin, Fanny’s original face is so bound up with Linli’s earliest, defining memories that she comes to feel that the surgeries have robbed her of her “real mother.”