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Sucker Punch Audiobook
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INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Chatelaine’s Favourite Books of Spring 2025 • Named a Best Book of 2025 by CBC • Audible • W • Book Riot
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.
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"Slate journalist Koul follows up her 2017 collection One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter with a sharp companion volume that reflects on body image, the dissolution of her marriage, and her mother’s cancer. “Parvati Stands in Flames” recounts how in the months leading up to Koul’s divorce, she picked arguments with her husband in an unsuccessful attempt to halt their slow drifting apart: “Fighting is a connection, a tether between two people who hate each other because they can’t find love.” Across several pieces, Koul explores her complex relationship with her mother, lamenting that though her mother’s body image issues contributed to her own, she’s still awed by her mother’s ability to hold their family together even while undergoing cancer treatment. Pairing humor with vulnerability, Koul reflects on how the end of her marriage exacerbated her eating disorder, writing, “Here are some things I would rather do in public than write about my body and, specifically, my struggle for self-esteem: punch my cat in the face, eat a leech, have sex with an impolite wolf.” The most powerful piece, “A Close Read,” describes Koul’s complicated feelings about reconnecting with a college friend who raped her to get his thoughts on an essay she had published about their relationship. Probing and strikingly candid, this is another winner from Koul. —Agent: Ron Eckel, Cooke McDermid Literary. (Mar.)"
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A beautiful, painful, funny, and ultimately inspiring account of a marriage crumbling, told through Koul’s distinct voice and trademark sense of humour. Brilliant.
— Jennette McCurdy, author of I'm Glad My Mom Died -
Sucker Punch is a generous and gutting book about marriage and mothers and the inheritances we all carry. Scaachi Koul’s genius here is stacking moments where you’ll burst out laughing, then pulling her own sucker punch: just when your heart is open, she sneaks in a turn that will make you weep. It’s a magic trick every time.
— Elamin Abdelmahmoud, author of Son of Elsewhere -
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 -
An absolute knockout. Koul's essays are 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 (which makes it all the more frustrating that she's from Canada).
— Isaac Fitzgerald, author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts -
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
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Slate journalist Koul follows up her 2017 collection One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter with a sharp companion volume that reflects on body image, the dissolution of her marriage, and her mother’s cancer. . . . Probing and strikingly candid, this is another winner from Koul.
— Publishers Weekly -
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025One of Vulture's Most Anticipated Books of 2025One of Electric Literature's '48 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2025'
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Koul puts on a breezy and fleetingly filthy sideshow, but when she writes about gender and race she reveals that knife-throwing is her main act.
— The New York Times
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About Scaachi Koul
Scaachi Koul was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and is a culture writer for BuzzFeed. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Hairpin, The Globe and Mail, and Jezebel. One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter is her first book. She lives in Toronto.