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.
Cringe meets comedy in a heartfelt memoir
"As the name suggests this is equal parts cringe and comedy. It is a brand of humour that will not be for everyone. After all, she is a millennial that likes to fight and be confrontational, who openly discusses every aspect of her life and seemingly takes no ownership of the role she may have played in her own unhappiness during phases of her life. That being said her brutal honesty and ability to sprinkle humour onto the darker parts of life is a refreshing voice. It is a memoir of self-reflection, of a childhood with Indian parents and all the expectations and dynamics that go along with it, of body image and inherited bad habits, of love and friendship and all the life that goes in between. As the child of immigrant parents and someone of Indian decent there are several anecdotes in Scaachi’s story that felt plucked from my own experiences. I liked that she fiercely approached her own experiences without sugar coating her pantomiming adulthood, her words, not mine. Sure, I don’t really understand why she would try to befriend a former assaulter, but trauma affects people in different ways and seeking answers or acknowledgement feels natural. I thought sharing this story and the malcontent in her dissolving marriage took so much vulnerability and insight. Her stories of life within her nuclear family and how they developed into adulthood are raw and honest. Overall, I enjoyed this memoir and laughed out loud several times while reading. I don’t like rating personal experiences, so I won’t, but I would recommend this one for those searching for a memoir of a thirty something brown woman living and learning through life with a hilarious way of seeing situations. 🎧 I was drawn to the cover of this one at an indie bookstore on Queen West, but I had already reached my quota for new books that day. This is mostly determined by how much my back can carry on my 40 minute walk back, and not on rational control on my purse strings. So I was thrilled to see my local library had a copy of the audiobook. The author narrates her own story, which is perfect for a memoir. I knew exactly whose stories I was listening to and felt like she was in the room sharing these pieces of life with me."
