Review: Sucker Punch

I very much enjoyed Scaachi Koul’s first book, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, when I read it in 2017 so I was looking forward to reading Sucker Punch. Reviewing memoirs is always tricky, even when it’s a collection of essays (it’s still a memoir, imo). I don’t want to judge someone’s life - that’s not what we’re doing today. But, I do have to judge how someone writes about their life. And there? I feel like Koul struggled.

Here’s the book’s description:

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.

When I was talking to a friend about what it was I struggled with, I sort of felt like Koul was writing about her trauma and she hadn’t yet worked through her trauma. I don’t know if she was at a place where she should have been writing this memoir. There were a lot of raw feelings that I didn’t feel all that comfortable reading about. It’s not that I felt like Koul was oversharing - though I’m sure there are many people who would think that - it’s just that I wasn’t sure if she was in the best place to be sharing some of those thoughts.

I also wondered how much she was telling and how much she was holding back. Obviously there’s going to be some stories that aren’t shared, I know that and expect that. But what I learned while reading Sucker Punch was that Koul edited her stories in her first book. Which, once you learn more, you understand why she did. Again, there was some trauma that she just hadn’t worked through and it seemed like she couldn’t face the truth even to herself, let alone while writing about it for the public to consume. Though I could see why she made the choice to tell a different version of her story, I couldn’t help but wonder what else she was editing for us.

Koul is a smart and funny woman - that comes through her writing and I think why I kept reading to the end of this collection. Her essays about her family were stronger, especially when writing about her mother’s cancer diagnosis, and hearing more about her family was my favourite part of the book.

Content warnings to be aware of: illness of a parent, divorce, rape, disordered eating, and pandemic life.

Sucker Punch was full of emotions and stories, some heartbreaking and others funnier and more uplifting. I think Scaachi Koul is a smart and talented writer but something about her latest collection missed the mark for me.

*An egalley was provided by the publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, via NetGalley in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*