Scaachi Koul let herself go 'fully insane' after her divorce. Her book explains why

In Sucker Punch, Scaachi Koul candidly recounts the painful events that turned her life upside down, from her marriage falling apart to her mother's cancer diagnosis.

With her signature humour, Koul reflects on navigating struggle — shifting from her belief that fighting is the only way out — to exploring when to fight and when to let go in the face of life's unexpected challenges.

"Sucker Punch is the truth, but more important than that, it is honest," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach.  "All I can do is offer my honest appraisal of what I think happened and how I feel about it.

"There will always be a million other versions of what happened and they will also be honest and true."

Koul is a writer from Calgary who currently lives in Brooklyn. Her debut book, One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter, was a finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

She is currently a senior writer at Slate and co-hosts the Ambie Award-winning podcast Scamfluencers. 

She joined Mattea Roach to talk about divorce in the public eye —and why she felt compelled to write about her experiences. 

Mattea Roach: What was it like to leave and have the fact of your leaving be so public? 

Scaachi Koul: So I think almost everybody has to kind of play this game when they have a life event like this happen because almost everybody is on the Internet. So when you get divorced, if you're just a regular person, you're still playing that game of, "How do I perform this out loud?"

How do I tell people? What do I tell people? Do I post about it? What do I do about the photos that I've left online? That is all shared experience. 

I made the super cool decision in my 20s to become an essayist, so I had the added complication of how do I write about this? Because I have to. 

My first book came out around eight years ago called One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter. A lot of it was about my family, my ex-partner, about the process of getting him sort of accepted into my family.

That book ends with me not really knowing if my family is going to get their head around him.

I realized that anything I write, I have to acknowledge this because I made a choice to tell people. How do I offer a narrative without it feeling incomplete? Which feels unfair, because I brought you into everything else and I also didn't know how to write anything without acknowledging it or without really getting into the weeds on it. 

Because then it becomes a weird omission, right? Do you just stop mentioning that you have a husband and then hope that people will notice? 

Which they would have, they absolutely would have over time, and people did, but it just felt like not my style. Also I was roiling with feeling — I was like a Calgary weather pattern. There were five strong feelings in about 28 minutes. You need a coat, everyone's unhappy, nobody wants to be outside. 

When I lived in Calgary for a couple years as a child, I remember it hailing on Canada Day. 

It always hails in the summer. You can have a day when it's -20 and then 20 degrees. That's how it felt hanging out with me, so everybody would have known. I had no subtlety, but I was also angry about the idea of having to perform being normal anyway. I didn't want to anymore.

Talk more about that because I think that's something that a lot of people who've gone through a big life event probably can relate to. The question of how long do I get to be really publicly upset about this? And at what point are people going to be like, "Okay, we get it, you're divorced. Please talk to me about something else."

I gave myself a year to be fully insane. Like money wasn't real. My decisions had no consequences. I could have anything I wanted. I could say how I felt as long as I didn't get sued, which I still abide by. I could be selfish in a way that as long as it didn't harm other people. And I was.

I was wanton and surly and delightful and exhausting. I drank a lot and I got 600 tattoos. I bought everything I wanted and I moved into a new apartment and I bought a custom pink velvet couch. 

I gave myself a year to be fully insane.- Scaachi Koul

I lost my mind, but it was what I needed. I think the thing that I took from that year is I still carry disinterest in performing for other people whatever I'm supposed to perform. 

How is it that you feel comfortable that people might not enjoy the way that you handle this thing that's happening in your life?

How did I get comfortable being upset? I felt like through my marriage, through my whole 20s, I was so preoccupied with what people think of me. Do they like me? Do I seem reasonable? Am I doing a good job? I panicked all the time about what my standing was with lots of people, no one more so than with my ex-husband.

Does he like me? Does he love me? Is he loyal? Does he want to take care of me? Does he want to stay in this relationship? Do I want to stay in this relationship? And so once that fell apart and exploded in such a catastrophic way and I really had to sort of reset my life in a lot of ways.

It was like, "Oh, it doesn't matter." The person I loved most in this world, who I thought I was building a life with and I felt very protective of and hoped was protective of me, does not care about me in the way that I need and have been asking for for a long time.

And I'm preoccupied with what?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Ailey Yamamoto.