Scaachi Koul let herself go 'fully insane' after her divorce. Her book explains why
Social Sharing
In Sucker Punch, Scaachi Koul candidly recounts the painful events that turned her life upside down, from her marriage falling apart to her mother's cancer diagnosis.
With her signature humour, Koul reflects on navigating struggle — shifting from her belief that fighting is the only way out — to exploring when to fight and when to let go in the face of life's unexpected challenges.
" Sucker Punch is the truth, but more important than that, it is honest," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "All I can do is offer my honest appraisal of what I think happened and how I feel about it.
"There will always be a million other versions of what happened and they will also be honest and true."
Koul is a writer from Calgary who currently lives in Brooklyn. Her debut book, One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter, was a finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.
She is currently a senior writer at Slate and co-hosts the Ambie Award-winning podcast Scamfluencers.
She joined Mattea Roach to talk about divorce in the public eye —and why she felt compelled to write about her experiences.
Mattea Roach: What was it like to leave and have the fact of your leaving be so public?
Scaachi Koul: So I think almost everybody has to kind of play this game when they have a life event like this happen because almost everybody is on the Internet. So when you get divorced, if you're just a regular person, you're still playing that game of, "How do I perform this out loud?"
How do I tell people? What do I tell people? Do I post about it? What do I do about the photos that I've left online? That is all shared experience.
I made the super cool decision in my 20s to become an essayist, so I had the added complication of how do I write about this? Because I have to.
My first book came out around eight years ago called One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter. A lot of it was about my family, my ex-partner, about the process of getting him sort of accepted into my family.
That book ends with me not really knowing if my family is going to get their head around him.
I realized that anything I write, I have to acknowledge this because I made a choice to tell people. How do I offer a narrative without it feeling incomplete? Which feels unfair, because I brought you into everything else and I also didn't know how to write anything without acknowledging it or without really getting into the weeds on it.
Because then it becomes a weird omission, right? Do you just stop mentioning that you have a husband and then hope that people will notice?
Which they would have, they absolutely would have over time, and people did, but it just felt like not my style. Also I was roiling with feeling — I was like a Calgary weather pattern. There were five strong feelings in about 28 minutes. You need a coat, everyone's unhappy, nobody wants to be outside.
When I lived in Calgary for a couple years as a child, I remember it hailing on Canada Day.
It always hails in the summer. You can have a day when it's -20 and then 20 degrees. That's how it felt hanging out with me, so everybody would have known. I had no subtlety, but I was also angry about the idea of having to perform being normal anyway. I didn't want to anymore.
Talk more about that because I think that's something that a lot of people who've gone through a big life event probably can relate to. The question of how long do I get to be really publicly upset about this? And at what point are people going to be like, "Okay, we get it, you're divorced. Please talk to me about something else."
I gave myself a year to be fully insane. Like money wasn't real. My decisions had no consequences. I could have anything I wanted. I could say how I felt as long as I didn't get sued, which I still abide by. I could be selfish in a way that as long as it didn't harm other people. And I was.
I was wanton and surly and delightful and exhausting. I drank a lot and I got 600 tattoos. I bought everything I wanted and I moved into a new apartment and I bought a custom pink velvet couch.
I gave myself a year to be fully insane. - Scaachi Koul
I lost my mind, but it was what I needed. I think the thing that I took from that year is I still carry disinterest in performing for other people whatever I'm supposed to perform.
How is it that you feel comfortable that people might not enjoy the way that you handle this thing that's happening in your life?
How did I get comfortable being upset? I felt like through my marriage, through my whole 20s, I was so preoccupied with what people think of me. Do they like me? Do I seem reasonable? Am I doing a good job? I panicked all the time about what my standing was with lots of people, no one more so than with my ex-husband.
Does he like me? Does he love me? Is he loyal? Does he want to take care of me? Does he want to stay in this relationship? Do I want to stay in this relationship? And so once that fell apart and exploded in such a catastrophic way and I really had to sort of reset my life in a lot of ways.
It was like, "Oh, it doesn't matter." The person I loved most in this world, who I thought I was building a life with and I felt very protective of and hoped was protective of me, does not care about me in the way that I need and have been asking for for a long time.
And I'm preoccupied with what?
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBC
6 days ago
- CBC
How characters from Alison Bechdel's past shook her out of her memoir-writing kick
Nearly 20 years after her breakout memoir, Fun Home, American cartoonist Alison Bechdel is still unearthing new truths about that period of her life. But this time, she's taking a look at her personal story through fiction, with her new comic novel, Spent. In Spent, she explores the life of a cartoonist, also named Alison Bechdel, who grapples with her complicated relationship with capitalism, community and activism after the success of her memoir and its subsequent TV adaptation. "When I was younger, I did lead a more communal life," Bechdel said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "I lived in a communal house. I went out and did political activities and was involved in my community. Over time, I really stopped doing that — and it's a bunch of factors. Part of it's getting older, part of it is being in a relationship, but a big part of it was that I was living very much on the edge until I was in my 40s, until Fun Home came out, and slowly saved my financial bacon." "Then I started making a lot of money, which was a very weird experience for someone who had formed their sense of self as an outsider and especially as a poor outsider." Bechdel, who is also known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and books Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, joined Roach to revisit her debut memoir and how it shaped her return to fiction. Mattea Roach: You published your memoir, Fun Home, almost 20 years ago when you were 45. Now you're in your 60s. How has your relationship with the text evolved over the past nearly two decades? Alison Bechdel: It's funny to have this thing, this record of my life that is unchanging, like it's cast in stone. Even though I have found out lots of interesting information about various people or scenes in the book that would change the story if I were to write it now, it's done. This is the record and it's very odd to have to be constantly talking about it. The book was published almost 20 years ago, but I'm still talking about it as if it's a new thing to people. So that's a funny activity to get one's head around. How did it come about that you learned new information about some of the stuff that's depicted in the book? Was it a situation where people you knew read the book and said that's not actually how it was? I'll tell you one example of that, which is that I learned from my mother's best friend, that on the day that my father died, she had decided to not divorce him. Wow. Your dad died when he was hit by a truck and that was two weeks after your mom had asked for a divorce. And then there's some significant suggestion that it might have actually been intentional on his part. In this tumultuous time around between when I came out to my parents and when he died, which was just a couple of months, my mother had asked him for a divorce. And now I find out that she had been going to call that off. It just just casts her whole story into this really different light. It was already quite a tragic story, but now it's even worse, you know? Fun Home was made into this Broadway musical in 2015 and it won five Tonys. It's a very different work despite being adapted from your memoir. How did it feel to hand over a project that was so personal to be adopted for another medium? I didn't really know what I was doing. I knew I had sort of sidestepped an offer to option it for a film by asking for more money than they were willing to pay me. Which was a great relief. But then this offer came up for a musical and I didn't really have a connection to musicals. I've seen musicals, but I'm not like a big musical person. Somehow it seemed like it was different enough that I wouldn't mind if someone made a really bad musical out of my book — and the way that I would mind if it were a really bad film adaptation. I don't know what I was thinking now, but fortunately, that didn't happen. The people who made it did a very good job. It's a really good adaptation, but I always sort of think, "Wow, that was lucky." In my new book Spent, I explore what it would be like to really lose control of a creative project. Why did you want to explore this alternate path that you're grateful, in your real life, to not have gone down? Well, partly because once you become a writer in this world, everyone expects you to then somehow do something for TV or the great triumph is to get your book turned into a TV show and that just always strikes me as funny. Why can't we just make comic books that are comic books? I guess, obviously, because you make more money, but it's also just a cultural phenomenon. You know that if you're a writer, you have to grapple with this. Why did you want to revisit these characters from your weekly comic strips Dykes to Watch Out For who are now in late middle-age but are still living together in a communal housing situation? This book, Spent, was going to be another memoir. That's what I started doing after my comic strip. I retired the comic strip and began writing books about my life. And I thought that's what I was going to do forever because I really liked writing about actual life. Occasionally, someone would ask me, do you ever think you'll do fiction again? And I would just go blank. Fiction? How do you do that? And I couldn't even remember that I had actually done this fictional comic strip. But I realized early on in the work for this book that doing it as a memoir was going to be really boring. I just somehow didn't want to write about my actual life or actually read Marx or all the things I would have to do to intelligently discuss money or capitalism. In the moment that I threw that idea away, this other idea came in. What would really be funny is if I wrote about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who was trying to write a book about money and then it just all sort of sprang to life — and in that new vision, there were my old comic strip characters who were going to be my friends. It just was one of those lovely moments when something just comes into your mind fully formed, which hardly ever happens to me.
CBC
21-05-2025
- CBC
Pete Crighton dishes on music, sex and finding his soundtrack to queer joy
Social Sharing Growing up in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic left Pete Crighton with a huge fear of sex — and he threw himself into music as a way to cope with those anxieties. "Even before I was struggling to make sense of my queerness, music just was another world for me," said Crighton on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "It was just a play-land where I didn't have to worry about my peers. I didn't have to worry about what I said or looked like or acted like." It wasn't until his 40s that Crighton knew he needed to face his fears and figure out how to live his queer life to the fullest. In his memoir The Vinyl Diaries, he takes readers on this journey — pairing big moments with the music that shaped them. On Bookends, Crighton tells Roach about his later-in-life exploration of sex and why music was so formative to his queer experience. Mattea Roach: This memoir is structured in a way where you're tying events in your life, relationships that you're in, to the music that you were listening to at the time. When did you realize that this nonlinear structure of association was the way that you wanted to write about your life? Pete Crighton: It's a great question. I don't know that I really consciously thought about it and it really just happened organically. It's the way I move through the world. All my markers are through what records I've bought, what records I've listened to and how I remember my life is really through those moments. All my markers are through what records I've bought, what records I've listened to and how I remember my life is really through those moments. - Pete Crighton I kept really detailed journals and when I would go back and look at things that I wanted to write about, I would actually have written down like, we listened to this record. This song was the one that Preston really liked. So I had this record of these things. When I would think of something I wanted to write about, it would just be in this journal, all of these associations from different points in my life because of those record albums and those songs. You were in this long-term relationship through your entire 30s. In your memoir, you write about how it was a little bit stifling for you that a lot of your creative impulses and interests didn't have space to breathe in that relationship. Can you tell me a bit about how you realized that that was not working? With all due respect to the person in question, it was all about me. It wasn't about him, but it was a slow build for sure. I was really, really terrified of HIV and AIDS when I was a youngster. So just the idea of being married, for lack of a better word, in a very heteronormative kind of way, was my salvation. To me, that's how I'm going to survive. That's how I'm going to thrive. I didn't really get to date a lot of people. I didn't get a lot of connections with other people. So I didn't really know what worked for me and what would bounce. I was with this person for over 10 years and it probably wasn't a great match for either one of us, to be perfectly frank. But one of the things I point to in the book is that he hated my record collection. That should have been a sign right from the start that maybe we weren't compatible because it's such an important part of my life. I think it's just those things that build up over time. There was no real thing that I could point to to be like, this was the day that it became untenable for me. You talk about marriage and monogamy as this kind of salvation, was the word that you used. Can you talk more about that? Why did it feel so central that you'd be willing to sacrifice some of your major interests and freedom and creativity in order to access monogamy? I was just so terrified of sex because of the HIV/AIDS crisis. I was 16 years old when Rock Hudson died and that was this big moment in the mass culture's understanding of what HIV and AIDS was and it just shut me down from truly wanting to explore my queerness and particularly my sexuality. So it wasn't so much marriage that I was after, but that idea of a monogamous relationship where we knew no one else was having sex with anyone else. And that felt safe to me. That felt like a protection from the thing that I was most afraid of, which was HIV and AIDS through sexual contact. What's really fascinating about this book is you tell this story about getting to explore hook up culture in your 40s, which is a story that I've heard about from talking to guys your age who've had that experience, but not a story that I'd read about in a book before. Why did you want to dig into that part of your journey? In fairness, to see it. I hadn't read this story and I grew up thinking your mid 40s is sort of like you're done, like that's the end of your life and you might retire and then you might play some golf or something like that. And I had never really read about this midlife excellence or excitement. So that was a real part of it for me was like, "Let's just be honest about what this journey is." For so long I wasn't honest about my own desires and my own sexuality that it just felt like laying it out really openly felt like the right choice to do as an artist and a writer.
CBC
11-05-2025
- CBC
Scaachi Koul discovered an AI-generated biography about her life
Scaachi Koul came to a weird, unexpected realization recently: someone had published a book about her life, and she had no idea who it was, or where it came from. Titled SCAACHI KOUL: From Shattered Dreams to Unstoppable Voice—A Story Of Love, Loss, and Resilience, the author and Slate columnist discovered the biography, previously available on Amazon for $7.99, while promoting her memoir, Sucker Punch. Although the title has since been removed from Amazon, Koul had the chance to read it for herself before it vanished. The book, purportedly authored by someone named Davis Bieber, appears to be AI-generated. But where did it really come from — and could this happen to anybody with a big enough online presence? Today on Commotion, Koul tells host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about what it was like finding the AI-generated biography, and what she learned from there. WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
