Pulling no punches: Calgary-born writer Scaachi Koul got divorced, reclaimed her narrative
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Scaachi Koul's initial concept for her second book of essays was completely different from how it turned out.
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It took her some time to figure this out, however. All the Calgary-born journalist, podcaster and pop-culture commentator knew at first was that the concept wasn't working. She signed a contract in 2018 for a follow-up to her 2017 book of personal essays, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. Her initial idea was to write a meditation on conflict. She even had a somewhat academic-sounding title: The Utility and Futility of Conflict.
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'I couldn't write a word of it,' says Koul, on the phone from her home in Brooklyn. 'First, I thought it was because of the pandemic, because all of my reporting got blown out because nobody could go anywhere. Then I was like 'maybe I just don't know how to write anymore.''
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Then, three years ago, she got divorced. The dissolution of her marriage offered a framework for the new book, which would eventually be renamed Sucker Punch and feature a wedding ring imbedded into the finger hole of a set of brass knuckles as its cover art.
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When the divorce was finalized, Koul had an epiphany about what was keeping her from writing. It wasn't the pandemic, and it wasn't that she had forgotten how.
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'Once my marriage fully fell apart and I could really look at it, I understood that was what was keeping me from doing anything. It clarified that I was fighting for things that I didn't actually care about and I didn't believe in and I didn't want,' she says. 'What a waste of my time. It has been liberating to give up. In a lot of ways, it's a book about giving up and failing and being righteous in failure.'
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So, in some ways Sucker Punch falls into a specific subset of literature, a divorce book that follows in the tradition of Leslie Jamison's Splinters, Sara Manguso's Liars and Nora Ephron's Heartburn. But unlike Manguso and Ephron's books, Sucker Punch is not a novel. Unlike Jamison's, it isn't fully a 'divorce memoir' either. Instead, the divorce provided a jumping-off point for a series of personal essays that tackle everything from body image to racism, family dynamics, sexual assault and her mother's cancer diagnosis.
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Conflict is still a running theme. Throughout the book, Koul reflects on the combative nature she shares with her family and her one-time belief that her talent for conflict and fighting – whether it be with her family, friends, ex-husband or online trolls – was a valuable skillset. So 'giving up' may seem an alien concept for Koul to embrace.
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