Scaachi Koul: 'Every writer should be in therapy'
After your first book of personal essays [One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter (2017)] was published, you married your long-term boyfriend, moved to New York, became aware of your husband's affair, spent the early pandemic months anxious as your parents were stuck in Jammu during India's lockdown, got divorced, lost your job at Buzzfeed, and your mom was diagnosed with cancer. You signed the book deal seven years ago, before the two major events it's about — your divorce and mom's cancer — unfolded. What was the book you were intending to write originally? When did you finally start working on the first draft of Sucker Punch?
It was supposed to be an essay collection about the utility and futility of conflict, so I was still trying to mine this thing. You're already laughing because you can imagine me banging my head against a wall like, 'Why can't I write this book about fighting?' And meanwhile, my marriage is on fire.
I entered this relationship clearly without the facts, not knowing what was going on and not knowing what would happen. I think a lot of people felt that way — you marry someone, and then the pandemic happens, and you're like, 'Hey, who the hell is this?' I even felt that in watching how my parents handled the issues of where they were. My mom has health issues, so she's really concerned about her access to things. They're not Indian citizens, so I was thinking about what government would take care of them. They were in Jammu, which is also tricky — getting in and out of there was kind of challenging. Dad, meanwhile, was having a scotch, having a laugh.
And so, I was trying to write this conflict book, and I just couldn't do it because everything was hard, and I was struggling to see the value of conflict. I had always felt like a protest worked. And then you watch Trump steamroll, the first time, through the American government. I was just disillusioned. I would send my book editor passages and she'd be like, 'This is bad. No.' I was lucky that I had someone who's really honest with me. But it wasn't really until my ex and I separated, and I was in my own apartment, I started filing things and I was being told, 'Yes, this is good.'
I'd say, the day he and I broke up, I was like, 'OH. Oh, I see.' It really was like a cloud lifted over me. I didn't know what I needed to say, but it was very clear that this was going to be a book about the collapse of what I thought was a fundamental truth.
While reading your book, I thought I understood all the reasons for your divorce: different fighting styles, the pandemic, too many years together... you'd analysed the relationship, his faults, your faults, the small things, all things. So, I was startled when I got to the part about his affair. Less than a year into your marriage, you discovered that he had been cheating on you for five years. Why did you decide to withhold it until much later in the book?
I felt like if I told the audience, at the very beginning of the book, my white ex-husband cheated on me with a white woman — no one was going to be able to read anything after that!
I'm trying to tell you all these other things that were genuinely, to me, more structurally damaging to my relationship than that. Like the funny thing about where it's placed: I don't leave. I find out [about the affair] and I think, 'Here's another thing for me to try to figure out how is my fault, and then I'll reverse engineer it.'
The earlier drafts were much kinder, and information like this was parceled out slowly and sparingly. Even still, I'm pretty careful about how much I'm saying, because I don't really care. It's not important to me, but it was important to the narrative. And when I've explained to you that I had hidden from myself so effectively, I have to tell you how and why. I was hiding from myself within the relationship. Then I felt like I was being hidden through this strange relationship with this woman. Even her confronting me about it and telling me the information felt like a way to kind of obfuscate my existence in it.
I really resent non-fiction books that don't tell you what happened... I promised you a story. I'm also not embarrassed by any of this. I didn't do it. I'm a passenger on a lot of this.
You deleted most of your Instagram posts and later some tweets. You cringed re-reading your first book. Tell me about the act of writing this very vulnerable memoir while also experiencing this need for erasure or distance from the past.
I'm okay with the decision about how public I am. I'm good at it. If I was bad at it, if the work was bad, then for sure, send me away. But if I'm going to do it, then I have to be really honest. So, I'm slower. I take longer, I think a little harder about it...
The funny thing is, the criticism the second book gets is 'Oh, this is mundane. Everybody's had stuff like this happen.' And, yeah, you're right. You're totally right. Sexual assault is incredibly common. Divorce is sooo boring. Cancer? Oh my god. My mom got one of the most common forms of breast cancer. ABSOLUTELY, you're right. And still, nobody's saying anything.
Shutting my mouth and dealing with the consternation privately just doesn't work for me. But also, Sucker Punch is 25 percent of what happened. It's only my version, and then it's maybe half of what I want to tell you. There's lots in there that isn't in there... because I don't really want to do if I don't need to do it. Maybe one day I will.
I've also gotten more comfortable with the fact that the work will feel outdated eventually. It should. I want it to feel outdated. If I read One Day We'll All Be Dead Again today and was like, yeah, I still feel like this. Oh my god, kill me! I don't want to be 34 and relate to work that I wrote at 22. No, no, no, no, no, NO. In 10 years, I hope I read Sucker Punch, and I'm like, what a stupid little girl.
You write that you'd rather 'punch my cat in the face, eat a leech... allow someone to watch me try to pluck an ingrown hair from the most tender part of my groin…' in public than 'write about my body and, specifically, my struggle for self-esteem.' But you do write about it. How did you let go of your body to write about your body?
I think it's a daily decision. Every day you wake up and it's really like, am I going to obsess over this today, or can I just be a person? Can I get through the day?
The first thing I had to get over was the idea that I was hiding, because I wasn't. Everybody could tell that I was tugging at myself and feeling uncomfortable. If you're stuck, even hiding that you're not happy about something, that's its own fight and everybody can tell.
I also think the worsening political environment has made it easier for me to not think so much about my body. It feels hard to me to wake up and be like, 'Ooh, my abs, I don't have any' when many people got murdered in a drone strike while you were sleeping.
But it was when my mom got sick, I started to not think about my body at all. It was very forgotten. Caretaking will do that. She's had, in the last three years, three major surgeries. And because I've been with her in some of these, I've seen that the body is remarkable; it really bounces back. That's not a great lesson: to caretake for someone you love, and then you will appreciate your body. What a morose way to go through life... My relationship with food changed a lot, too, because when my mom got radiation, she lost her appetite. That's really what I'm still trying to get back for her. All of these things are, to me, remarkable privileges. And I hope I can hold on to that feeling as long as possible.
How does therapy help the writing process — do you have to be able to process something before you write about it or is writing itself therapeutic?
No. Oh, my god. People who are like, 'I don't go to therapy. I just do X.' NO, YOU DON'T. Every writer should be in therapy. I do not trust, I do not trust, an essayist who does not go to therapy. I don't care what they're doing instead. No, I went so much. I just did my taxes yesterday — and I pay [for therapy] out of pocket because I love my therapist, so I won't put her through my awful insurance — and I wrote down how much I paid her. I'm like, damn it, this woman, she must be buying boats with what I'm spending.
The funny thing about divorce — any breakup, too — is that it f*cks with your sense of reality, and you need someone who's going to be able to tell you what happened. It's hard to trust your friends sometimes because they hated him. If I trust my mother, then I would move home and that's a different path too that isn't quite right. But I needed somebody who could be like, 'Let's figure out what our version of it is, and I'll help.' It was so necessary. Everybody should be in therapy.
It opens with your memories of visiting the mandir, growing up in Canada. And your metaphors are quite strongly rooted in the stories of Hindu goddesses, starting with Parvati and ending with Kali. What made you use Hindu mythology as a framework for the book?
That framework was the last thing I put in the book, which is funny to think about because it feels, to me, important. But I had written all of the essays and they just weren't speaking to each other, and I couldn't figure out what I needed to do to make them talk to each other. The thing that I kept thinking about is that in all of my guilt around the divorce was my earliest memory of being at the mandir and this old auntie yelling at me for spilling a glass of water. The embarrassment that I used to feel at the temple felt so similar to how embarrassed I felt after my divorce. And so, the rebellion of the divorce felt religious. It felt like I was committing an affront to a god.
I'm not an expert on any of this. These are the stories I was told. And it felt like if I'm untangling stuff that I think is true about my life, then I have to start with these fundamental ones from the very beginning of my life: that this is how women behave, they behave this way in kind of a religious context, we're taught to follow that spirit. But what if I think about it differently? And why haven't I heard about Kali? Nobody talks to me about the fun ones!
The divorce didn't drive me to God that much because I still viewed it as a temporal event. When my mom got sick, I was like, am I being punished for something? And that's really when I felt that this is all I have.
The original title of your book was going to be I Hope Lightning Falls on You — a translation of 'Paye thraat,' a Kashmiri curse phrase your mother casually hurled at you whenever exasperated — and I thought it would've been quite apt because this is maybe your most Indian writing. How did it become Sucker Punch?
I know, I know. I really had so many conversations with myself and with my editors about it. I think the reason why I changed it ultimately was that 'I hope lightning falls on you' to me, is such a tender phrase, so associated with my mom and with my family.
When I thought about this book, which is full of really a lot of cruel stuff and stuff that does not have to do with my mother (she doesn't really come in full until after the divorce), it just felt too tender for what the content was.
I was talking to my book editor about it and her husband was in the room, and he was like, what about Sucker Punch? I was so mad, I cannot believe a man has figured it out. But it just made more sense.
But yeah, something will come, and it will be called I Hope Lightning Falls on You, for sure.
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
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