Review: Sucker Punch: Essays by Scaachi Koul
Reviewed by Makenzie Stuart
St. Martin’s Press. 2025. 254 pages.
What are the things that you whisper about behind closed doors? The things that everyone knows, even if they don’t want to admit them? The things you’d be crucified for talking about at a cocktail party? These are the things that Scaachi Koul writes about in Sucker Punch, her recent collection of essays.
This collection primarily explores Koul’s divorce and how it interweaves with every aspect of her life. Not every essay directly declares “this is about the divorce,” but instead, Koul displays a kaleidoscope of challenges faced throughout her life and how they seeped into the time surrounding the divorce. Something endearing about the collection is how open she’s willing to be, and how she poses this openness in the realm of not only her life, but the layer of her persona as an essayist and the subsequent implications of this openness as a whole.
In the essay “Two Stars,” Koul states “I’m exhausted from telling the truth all the time. No one really asked me to do it, but now I’m in so deep I don’t even know how I would ever get out.” This quote gets at what’s so exceptional about this collection— it’s honest, vulnerable, and full of clarity at its core. One might want to say that this is the nature of the essay as a genre, but that does not account for how this kind of honesty reaches not only the depths of the persona, but beyond Koul herself, digging into the universality of her experience. This kind of honesty makes it easy to be caught off guard at how frankly Koul tells her stories. We see this in the essay “Chocolate, Lime Juice, Ice Cream” when she discusses eating disorders as a societal failure, stating that a woman who told her she was indulgent just for eating pizza “didn’t know what she was saying. Or maybe she did, as we all do: she rose from the same shit-soil that I did, too.”
In addition to circling her divorce, the collection also touches on disordered eating, sexual assault, caring for an ailing parent, cultural differences, self-image, and what it means to exist today on the internet, especially as a woman. Despite the fact that American society has increasingly become more open about disclosing personal trauma and recognizing the difficulties we all face, it can still be jarring to see such issues on the page, even in a personal essay. Many essayists may find their work roadblocked by how they might come across to people, how a reader might react, or how they may be received by publishers. While facing these confines, Koul refuses to be quiet about taboo topics, instead stating that “There’s nowhere to hide in writing. You just have to let yourself be visible, and trust that your reader sees you with compassion and care.”
This is not to say that the things Koul is writing about, things like eating disorder culture or misogynistic microaggressions, are things we shouldn’t speak about, or things that are never spoken about, or even things that we are shocked to hear addressed. Instead, they are the kind of things that hold a duality in the court of the internet today: doomed to be squeezed like a lemon until dry; or turned away from—destined to be left ripe on the tree and chosen to be ignored. This is the point at which a writer has to make a choice: how will audience opinion influence the things they are willing to talk about? Koul addresses this continuously, not only with direct conversations, but also by situating all of her essays within the context of being online.
The voice of an audience is in every writer’s ear, but in Sucker Punch Koul talks about how it surrounds her: from being accosted by curious strangers walking down the street, to comments on her tweets and Instagram posts, to her personal life with friends and family commenting on everything from her weight to the things she could have changed to save her relationship. While we probably all consider what people want to hear, we don’t all take advantage of the opportunity to try and form the kind of platform where we can share the kind of ideas that the audience might need to hear. However, Koul does, saying things like, “You are no longer ruining your own life, you’re ruining someone else’s. Your ideology is contagious” as an answer to people who blame their shortcomings on a larger societal failing rather than taking personal accountability. While Koul is surrounded on all sides by opinions, she doesn’t cater to them. Her persona doesn’t feel crafted, but honest, a kind of honesty that a reader can tell has been earned by someone who gained popularity online and had to find their way back to authenticity from the performance of self that social media demands we do.
The way Sucker Punch is suffused with the internet is something unique and specific to this collection. Koul, as a culture writer for spaces such as Buzzfeed, Slate, and The Huffington Post, has had her share of eyes leering over her words. In the essay “Two Stars,” she says “I am tired of the negotiation I made, every day, whether to be my true self online or not. I am tired of wondering whether the record could turn on me eventually or not. What am I so worried about? I’m dying. We all are.” Here, she gives a voice to the feelings we have all felt, considering the way we understand and manipulate authenticity on social media.
This quote is just one example of how Scaachi beautifully blends three things together in her collection: humor, modernity, and the personas’ reflections. Essayists are often taught to be very specific and meticulous when choosing how to approach contemporary references and information—the specific references made, the timely sociopolitical settings included, the way these things should be described to avoid confusing a reader. In this work, Koul utilizes the settings of the COVID-19 pandemic, the #MeToo Movement, and the rise of internet culture writing in places like Slate, to place the collection—it has a right here, right now, this is where I am way about it. This only continues to build as the persona in the pieces reflects on her memories, moving towards not an understanding, but an unraveling collage of how she got to this place, this personhood today.
The final cherry on top of this present persona is the sense of humor. Koul states in “Two Stars” that “If you found out because I’m joking about it, don’t worry. The traumatic part is already long over.” This unfazed is felt in the emotion of the collection, in moments where she jokes about how death threats are “not the sentence I was promised by late-stage capitalistic white millennial digital media feminism.” The humor is quippy, quick witted, and timed out to release some of the tension that comes with talking openly about taboo subjects.
In short, Scaachi Koul’s Sucker Punch hands you a Rubik’s cube of Koul’s life next to a set of essays that helps you rotate each square to put it back in its place. It’s funny, frank, and fabulously invested in what belongs in an essay: the taboo, the unsavory, the honest, and the things you’d be crucified for talking about at a cocktail party. No matter the darkness of the topic, Koul’s frankness serves as a reminder that not addressing a problem won’t make it go away. Instead, more open and honest discussion is needed for our culture to heal from the wounds inflicted upon it.
Makenzie Stuart is an essayist residing in Denton, Texas, pursuing an MA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on Nonfiction from the University of North Texas. They currently serve as the Essays Editor for the American Literary Review.