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by Scaachi Koul
From the cultural critic and bestselling author of One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter comes a poignant, bitingly funny, and unabashedly candid new memoir in essays.
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 humour 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.
"Probing and strikingly candid, this is another winner from Koul." —Publishers Weekly
"The author's trademark self-lacerating humor does not quite save the day." —Kirkus Reviews
"A sharp and candid collection of essays." —The Millions
"A beautiful, painful, funny, and ultimately inspiring account of a marriage crumbling, told through Scaachi Koul's distinct voice and trademark sense of humor. Brilliant." —Jennette McCurdy, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller I'm Glad My Mom Died
"Scaachi Koul's Sucker Punch is an absolute knockout. An instantly essential entry into the modern divorce canon, Koul's collection of essays is packed full of diamond-sharp writing, exemplary wit, eviscerating truths, and—most importantly—a rib-shattering amount of heart. Here is Scaachi Koul at her most vulnerable, while somehow still casually holding onto her rightfully-earned crown as one of America's funniest living writers." —Isaac Fitzgerald, author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
"With a sharp wit and even sharper writing, Scaachi Koul writes a compulsively readable memoir that journeys into the dark heart of heterosexual love. This book will have you howling with laughter, weeping with rage, and furiously turning every page. Sucker Punch is an unapologetic story of one woman's fierce fight to keep those beautiful loud, funny, raw, tender, pugilistic pieces of herself in a world that wants to yank them away. This book is a beautiful bruiser." —Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife
This information about Sucker Punch was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Scaachi Koul is a Senior Writer for Slate and the co-host of the Ambie Award-winning podcast, Scamfluencers. She co-hosted the Emmy-nominated Netflix series, Follow This, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, This American Life, New York Magazine, and The Cut. You can also find her in documentaries like Quiet On Set and Pretty Baby. Her bestselling book, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None Of This Will Matter, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and a finalist for The Leacock Medal for Humour and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. You can follow her on Instagram or on her Substack, Hater Nation. Originally from Calgary, she lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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