Pulling no punches

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This article was published 22/03/2025 (391 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Who do we fight with? Who do we fight for? And, crucially, when is it time to hang up the gloves?

Fighting is a through line in Sucker Punch, the second collection of memoir-in-essays from Canadian culture critic Scaachi Koul. So, too, is divorce, as reflected in the brilliant cover image of a set of brass knuckles, the ring finger replaced with a giant, knuckle-dragging engagement rock.

Fighting was Koul’s love language, her safe port. Until it wasn’t.

“I’m at my best when I’m embroiled in a fight. I thrive in conflict, like an oyster that forms pearls out of unwanted intruders,” Koul writes in the first few pages of the book.

She fought with the man who would become her ex, but she also fought for him when he was the man who would become her husband, her father not speaking to her for a year because she wanted to marry an older white guy. Trouble is, her ex never seemed to want to fight at all. Not with. And not for.

This is a more assured — and sincere — outing from Koul, whose last essay collection, 2017’s funny and frank One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter had a lighter touch, despite also tackling some heavy subject matter.

But then, a lot of life has happened to Koul since the publication of that book: she got married in an elaborate four-day wedding, a global pandemic hit, her mother got sick, she lost her job, her marriage imploded.

And unlike its predecessor, Sucker Punch requires a linear read. Divided into sections named for the Hindu pillars of samsara, karma, dharma and moksha, these essays beautifully braid cultural and traditional perspectives of marriage and divorce with Koul’s own experience with both.

This is, in many ways, a marriage post-mortem — and as such, the constant probing, prodding and examining can start to feel a bit tedious, as it surely was for the woman who actually lived it. But Koul has a canny ability to make you feel like you’re reading missives from a particularly funny and insightful friend, and the thing about friends is, you want to be down there in the muck with them.

And Koul is indeed funny, as anyone familiar with her work well knows. But the humour here is sharper, more cutting and more sparing. She doesn’t use it to deflect or downplay; not everything is distilled down into zingers. She’s honest — sometimes brutally so. “Unflinching” is an overused term in book reviews, but Koul doesn’t look away. She’s not afraid to show us the ugly parts. This is a woman who is done keeping up appearances.

Not all of Sucker Punch is about divorce, at least not directly. She writes affectingly about her mother’s cancer diagnosis, about her parents’ marriage — our first model of marriage — and the morality crisis that comes with caring for aging parents. She also writes beautifully and revealingly about hunger, body image and her mother in an essay entitled Chocolate, Lime Juice, Ice Cream.

And she writes movingly about being alone again, shopping for a single mug, a single spoon — “I don’t know what I like anymore” — but ultimately building a life that’s hers. And that’s always worth fighting for.

Jen Zoratti is a Free Press columnist.