Cheat Sheet: Scaachi Koul Talks Betrayal

The author of Sucker Punch reflects on the trauma of trying to write a book as her marriage splintered into a million sharp pieces.

Photo credit: Barbora Simkova, Simkova Studios

What happens when you discover your marriage is a lie? In her new book Sucker Punch, Scaachi Koul traces her descent into hell with stunning clarity, wit, and unvarnished rage. Koul is one of the funniest writers of her generation in my not-so-humble opinion, and Sucker Punch impressed me more than anything she’s written so far. Being brutally honest with yourself while writing a memoir is excruciating work, but Koul boldly dissects her previous delusions, lays bare the aggressive but loving contours of her upbringing, and even interrogates the overly optimistic gloss of her first memoir, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. I admired the bravery of Sucker Punch so much that I wanted to ask Koul how the hell she managed to pull it off. I figured she’d bring a lot of humility and raw emotion to the table, and boy, was I right!

I’m in awe of how plainly and clearly you express exactly who you are and how you feel in this book, yet you also have a great sense of humor about yourself. Finding all of that together in one writer is so rare. I’m repeatedly struck with this sense of awe, like, WHAT DOES SHE DO EVERY DAY TO MAKE THIS POSSIBLE? And that’s my very earnest first question: How do you keep yourself in the kind of swaggery yet optimistic state where you can write this way?

I guess I feel like I don't have a choice. Sadness and despair are so easy to access, I can do it anytime. After my ex and I broke up, I was genuinely worried I wouldn't be funny again, and that I wouldn't be able to write again. The stress took away my ability to read and my sentences were coming out so disjointed that my boss at the time put me on leave; my first drafts looked like they had been written in hieroglyphics. I was so angry. I felt like I had been robbed. It just felt like the only thing I was good at — and ultimately, the only thing I was able to carry out of my marriage — was the ability to tell a story that had at least one joke in it.

Marriage was a decision I made because so many people told me I would get something out of it: security, love, comfort, reassurance, a teammate. That's just not what I was getting out of it. All I had was the story. All I had was the joke.

You describe feeling no connection to one of the stories in your first book upon rereading. Was your intention with Sucker Punch to dive in and do something more courageous or more messy?

I know it's not the answer anyone on my publishing team wants to hear (sorry) but I never tell people to read my first book. I know it still has value and I do love that people still talk about it and think about it, but the story I believed about my life back then just rings false to me now. This is, I know, actually good news: I want old work to feel old, otherwise that means I'm stagnant. But my divorce did prompt a secondary look at how I used to frame things, the way I hid from myself.

And divorce IS messy! I felt like mine was spilling into the street no matter what I did, I felt exposed all the time. Once I got over my fear of it, it got easier to tell the truth and to be uglier. Like, we die at the end of this, and I'm worried about seeming morose? About looking like a loser? Whatever, man!

I sold Sucker Punch seven years ago. Back then, I conceived of it as an essay collection about the futility and utility of conflict (which I do still believe in, but maybe in a different way). I had just gotten engaged and had a completely different — but still impractically rigid — sense of myself and my life. By the time I was actually able to write something, my whole world view had shifted, and so whatever perspective I had while writing One Day We'll All Be Dead had mutated into something foreign even to me.

How many times during the writing of Sucker Punch did you want to quit writing? Did you call people and say things like “I hate this book, it sucks” like I do every few weeks when I’m working on a book, or did you keep the faith without tormenting yourself in this way?

Oh, I tried to quit every forty five seconds. If you look through my texts for the words "this book is bad" you will get hundreds and hundreds of results, me telling everyone I know "I think this book is bad." I told my friends and my editors and my parents and strangers. I could not stop telling people how much it sucked.

But I was lucky in a few ways, namely that my Knopf Canada editor Kiara Kent is also one of my closest friends, so she was a witness to both my marriage falling apart and to the writing I was trying to do before and after the divorce. While my ex and I were still together, I had attempted to write my little conflict book, but every draft I sent her fell flat. She found beautiful and loquacious ways to tell me "not quite," and then I would go back to the draft and try again. The writing never got better while I was married, and I was never going to be able to write that book —or any book — so long as I stayed with him. For years, Kiara told me in a thousand ways through my worthless drafts what I needed to do. When I left him, she was one of my first calls. A few months later, I sent her another version of the first essay from Sucker Punch, and it was the first time since selling the proposal that she told me the work was actually good. I believed her every time she told me it was rotten so I had to believe her when she told me when I got it right. (I am still asking her if she thinks it sucks; she reassures me it does not.)

It does not! But it makes sense that the surge of honesty that came from leaving the marriage led to better writing. You mention the loneliness of your life when you moved to NYC for the first time. I answer a lot of letters about the specific terrors of getting through your 20s and early 30s. What fears guided you at that time, and what would you do differently if you could go back and do it again? (Also do you still live in NYC or did you return to Canada?)

I'm still in New York. After my divorce I moved to another neighborhood in Brooklyn and restarted, again. Six years in and I'm finally starting to feel comfortable here. What scared me most in my 20s now feels so puerile to me: I was preoccupied with my reputation. I wanted to seem sane and well-adjusted and clever and untouchable. My ego got in the way of taking social risks, of seeming like a try-hard, of admitting to ambition or heartbreak or grief or desire. I was so mean to my parents, I can't even believe it now. Of course I was lonely: I could never really ask for what I wanted. God, I was so mean, mostly to myself. That's my only regret, so far: I got married for a good reason, I loved someone and wanted it to be meaningful, I saved myself from it. But I wish I had been kinder, to me and everyone around me. It wouldn't have changed anything, but maybe it would have made it a bit easier.

Are you better at asking for what you want now? What did you do to get to a place where you started to recognize yourself as a person with rights and feelings that deserved to be respected? Why do you think so many of us struggle just to honor our own needs when we’re young?

No, unfortunately this remains unusually hard for me, but I have gotten very good at identifying what other people want and bullying them into actually asking for it. Closed mouths don't get fed, but like most women and women of color in particular, I've been socialized into thinking that a desire is unseemly, that's it's too much, that it makes me greedy.

But I do think about it a lot. I struggle with even having needs; I still sometimes like to dream about having none, like an anesthetized orb. I think, maybe, to honor our own needs is to acknowledge how hopelessly out of control we are, and how much we need other people. To recognize the things we need — or, at least, that I needed — means speaking out loud how interconnected we are, how much we rely on each other, how much we actually want from each other and how deep our disappointments go.

Ow, that last part! I definitely struggle with that. And I often write about how trying to seem better than you really are prevents you from feeling better about yourself, because as long as you’re focused on seeming, you’re never living in reality or reckoning with what’s here. How has your life changed in positive ways since you started to let go of seeming and decided to serve your feelings and show your flawed self to the world instead?

Oh, let me tell you about giving up the performance: what a fucking gift that is. Your whole life opens up to you when you just lean into your failure. I spent so many years trying to prove to myself and other people that my marriage was a good one; it was exhausting and time-consuming. Not having to keep that up gave me so many hours in the day. I remember feeling really lost for the first few weeks that I didn't have this narrative to maintain. I kept thinking, oh, this is how other people can have hobbies.

Then, when I lost my job and my mom got cancer, I felt even more confronted with how arbitrary things actually are. The cancer really threw me for a loop — no one in my family has ever had cancer and my mom wasn't really a high risk patient. It was this catastrophic reminder of how thin the membrane is between here and wherever else we go. Like, we die after all of this guaranteed, and I'm wasting my time on do people think I'm a loser because I'm single? Jesus Christ!

Less than a year into your marriage, you discovered that your husband had been cheating on you for five years. I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I got to that part of the book. How do you process a betrayal that enormous? Do you have any advice for others who are struggling with anger and shame in the wake of being cheated on?

I found out about the affair right before our first wedding anniversary, but I also found out right before the pandemic. It all felt brutalizing, but maybe worse was that I was surprised: I didn't see it coming, and it felt like someone punched me in the back of the head while I was turning away. Worse was that I then had to process my feelings about it while we were in the same space: I was new to America, to New York, and then the lockdowns started and my green card was pending, so there was no way for me to go back home to see my mom (she was stuck in India at the time, making things even worse) or my friends (who had small kids and couldn't risk infection). I think I just chose to turn off the switch that allows me to experience life. I didn't know I could dissociate so successfully until then, and I was so sure that the affair was actually my fault which felt too unbearable to face. Eventually, I grew grateful that he cheated on me, that it was such a long-standing affair, and that I knew so much about it. Sometimes I'm not sure I would have gathered myself up to leave, even if it took me a few more years to do it.

I don't think cheating is a moral failing that a couple can't get past. People make mistakes and sex is a complicated thing. What hurt me about the affair was actually that I felt like my husband couldn't see me clearly. My version of myself and his version of me were so different, and I couldn't wrap my head around this very basic and fundamental miscommunication. But I also felt like he didn't want to get to know me or correct his vision. It was lonely in there.

What I wish I had been able to do right after finding out was to hit pause on my life. I needed to take a week off from work, to leave the apartment we shared together, to turn my phone off and think about what I wanted and what I was getting. I couldn't do that, obviously, but sometimes I wonder if that week of quiet contemplation would have sped up the next few years of my doomed marriage. Maybe not. It's a fun thought exercise to think of what I could have done with that time instead. The point is that I needed to remember that, actually, I can see myself perfectly clearly even if someone else can't. Once I recognized that, I left.

The closer I get to defining my grief and my desires, the less angry I feel.

You have a newsletter that’s just a list of things you hate. Did you start it in part as a way to indirectly grapple with anger from your divorce? Are you someone who holds grudges? Because, sadly, I am! What, if anything, makes grudges less painful? What have you learned about expressing anger and also letting go of it?

The newsletter started when I was detaching myself from Twitter. My brain still works in 140 characters, regrettably, so I wanted somewhere to put these sentence-sized thoughts. I don't think I'm actually a very big grudge-holder! If I've forgiven someone, I generally can and will move beyond it. But I do hold people accountable —more now in my 30s than in my 20s, certainly — which sometimes takes the sheen of grudge-holding. But I think it's good to remember when and how you've been harmed, not in order to become hardened, but to recognize patterns in yourself and in others so you learn your lesson. What I do love to do, however, is exit. Nothing and no one will make me stick around for an unpleasant time.

Everything used to make me mad. I was sometimes reactive, but mostly it was an internal battle. I was angry at disloyalty and condescension and failed process and infrastructure. I was always getting my feelings hurt and pretending I wasn't. The closer I get to defining my grief and my desires, the less angry I feel. This is, to me, very annoying: I like my anger, it protects me and vice versa. But it does make it hard to get near me, and it did help poison my marriage in the long term, and it keeps me very lonely.

Originally, my book was supposed to be an essay collection about conflict. I still see so much value in expressing rage, especially when it's for someone else. I'm happy to have my rage be borrowed or aimed with precision, like I'm a fire hose (except instead of water it's... more fire). But I'm also very quick to relinquish the fight these days. Colleague being snippy? Well, will you look at the time. New friend unable to hear a boundary? See ya later, creep! Man spends a date talking about his ex-girlfriend? I mean, I'll fuck him, but I won't be sweet about it. Divorce helped me clue in that, in every arena of my life, I can bail. I don't have to do this, whatever THIS is! I have a few requirements in the world: I have to pay my rent, I have to be nice to my friends, I have to call my mom, and I have to fight fascism.

But everything else? Every argument with a man who doesn't see my worth? Every inch of anger I gather over being disrespected professionally? Carrying shame from relationship to relationship, none of which was my shame to begin with? Fuck that. I'll waste my time on it when I'm dead, which at this rate could be any minute now.

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You can buy Sucker Punch right now (recommend!) or go see Koul discuss her book in Toronto, Brooklyn, Portland, or Los Angeles and buy a signed copy in person. Send advice letters about cheating, divorce, or anything else to askpolly@protonmail.com. Ask Polly publishes 1-2x a week for paid subscribers so: