In ‘Sucker Punch,’ Scaachi Koul Reveals Too Much, and Also Not Enough

In her first collection, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, the irreverent voice of memoirist Scaachi Koul charmed many readers, including myself. The 33-year-old Koul showcases this voice in her second collection of autobiographically-centered essays, Sucker Punch, but the book ends up illuminating her limitations as a writer as much as it showcases her strengths.

Koul goes places other memoirists don’t dare, with bracing results. She speaks about growing up as a brown girl of Indian descent in Calgary where she struggled to fit in, spends pages dissecting the flaws of her body and the bulimia she has struggled with, and tells us of her overdependence on her intrusive and often critical mother.  And she dissects the many men she has been with, who have disappointed her with their callousness. Koul, a senior writer at Slate, is trying to find her place in the world. Her friends are often unreliable, and she often struggles with bouts of loneliness whether she’s seeing someone or not.

At 20, Koul married a white man thirteen years her senior. The relationship didn’t work out and they divorced a decade later, leaving her a single 30something in Manhattan. She struggles with feelings of failure about the demise of the marriage, and to make matters worse, she felt ashamed to tell her parents, who had disapproved of the union from the get-go. Their own marriage was an arranged one. In almost all the essays here, her ex-husband keeps resurfacing as she relives their painful years together, his cheating, and her compulsion to keep writing about him online where she has a heavy presence on social media.

She has been chronicling her life online since she was 14, and one senses she doesn’t really feel something has happened unless she’s shared it with others. Koul wants her followers’ admiration and attention; and it is as seductive to her as any of her relationships. One pictures her having an experience while simultaneously writing about it in her mind and then putting it out online. While this sometimes allows her to be funny, preceptive, and bitingly observant, it has a shelf life that eventually peters out and leaves readers wanting more.

When she writes about her marriage, we can feel her unhappiness, but she never really shares with us the give and take of their relationship.  We learn nothing about their sex life, or what drew them to each other, and why he managed to eventually wield such power over her. She seems to sense her own opaqueness, writing:

“What story do you tell yourself about how you came together, and what kept you together?  I had told our story a thousand times. I wrote essays about him and me and us, and later, a book cataloging the impossible challenge of getting my aged, tricky, mercurial white boyfriend. I made money on the story about our fight—I wrote about how my father stopped speaking to me because I was dating someone he hadn’t picked.  I turned our fight into profitable art while I wedged my boyfriend further into my family, getting engaged and getting married and making him permanent, like he had always wanted.”

But is this what she wanted?  We’re not sure whether she even deems her wants as worthy of consideration. She places so much effort upon how things appear to others. The laptop keeps calling her back for more.

Koul speaks rarely about having love for anyone. Everybody seems expendable in her universe. When she realizes her marriage is falling apart, she stays wedded to her recitations about their destructive tirades and she seems oblivious to the fact that her worry about all other inconsequential observers is intruding on her ability to be in the moment with him, or really anyone.

Koul never says this, but we sense her early marriage might have been her escape route from her overwhelming mother whom she found annoying.  Still, she defends her mother, writing:

“My mother wasn’t just anything.  She was the most stubborn woman in the world.  She seemed to stand sixty feet tall during my childhood.  She scared at least a few of my friends, something about the way her brow knit together and made you feel like you were in trouble for just breathing.”

Her mother refused to apologize for any of her rash acts or moodiness. Koul finds this distressing, but focuses on the way her mother showed her affection: through feeding her delicious slices of watermelon with dinner. She jokes, “Is there any apology more universal from an ethnic mother that wordless feed you until you’re sick with love?”  Koul explains her family was a combative one; everyone was always yelling about something, and her older brother seemed to be the only one who could stay mostly out of the fray. She thinks the argumentativeness of her family home primed her for her success on social media.

Koul admits she is a writing junkie, the continual star of her own story. She loses herself in a flurry of words that sometimes illuminate deeper woes but more often conceal her own efforts at self-discovery. The need to be clever and enticing is exhausting, and we can feel her energy at times bleeding out on the page. She’s always offering up so much camouflage and deception as something else.  Sadly, the responses she often receives only deepen her mistrust in others and increase her paranoia. It’s a vicious cycle of self-condemnation masquerading as self-reflection.

When Koul shares with us a terrifying story of being date-raped in college, she has trouble letting go of the incident, nor does she attempt to get help.  She instead continues to engage with the man who did this to her in a series of texts hoping he will apologize for what he has done.  When this never happens, she takes out her frustration on her then-husband ,listing for him all the faults he has that she finds bothersome.

On a Zoom call with a friend during the pandemic, they play a game asking each other personal questions. What was your first impression of me?  What do you think is my biggest weakness?  When her friend claims Koul is oversensitive about her appearance, she is deeply wounded. It makes her uncomfortable. We realize that even though she often fools us into thinking she is being revelatory, it is really a dressed-up deceptiveness that she puts forth as authenticity. She has trouble dealing with deeper truths; about herself or anyone close to her.  She stays in a safe lane that is masquerading as something it is not.

Koul sometimes slips and reveals how much she misses being married despite knowing he was the wrong man for her.  It hurts her that they ended so badly and his last words to her still sting.  He yelled: “Do you think someone’s going to put the work into you that I have?”  She finds herself fumbling with the daily responsibilities of life and realizes she doesn’t know how to fully take care of herself. How does one fix the loose knob on the stove?  Or balance a checkbook?  Or screw in a lightbulb? Her husband always did all of that and she feels inept.

Koul has got a tremendous amount of natural talent and enough life experiences to share, but she needs to get out of her own way.  She needs to embrace herself apart from her social online presence, which at this point is hampering her writing instead of enhancing it.  One finishes this page-turning diatribe about young life and all of its misgivings hoping she will give herself a chance to do so in her next collection.