By her own admission, Scaachi Koul's 2017 debut, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, charted her course to marrying her now ex-husband. Her follow-up essay collection, Sucker Punch, paints a painful yet darkly humorous picture of divorce that stands on its own while also working as a companion to her first book. Koul--a senior journalist at Slate, podcast host, and contributor to publications such as the New Yorker--goes beyond a typical, linear recounting of divorce by mapping her experience onto stories about the Hindu deities that she grew up with. While none of the essays are light reads, each is accessible, if fragmented. Koul is aware of this disjointedness, asking mid-essay: "How do I tell you the story of the worst bet I ever made? Do I tell it from the end to the front, from the point where I knew how catastrophically I had failed? Or should I start it from the beginning, when I knew the least I would ever know?"
Rather than serving as a detraction, Sucker Punch's fractured parts are integral to its strength. Koul surveys a lot of ground with an unflinching gaze--whether turned inward on her own propensity to pick a fight, or outward by castigating the men who have wronged her, and examining how her mother's history of dieting damaged Koul's relationship with her own body. Ultimately, Koul learns that "walking away from a fight isn't cowardice; sometimes it's the only way to win" and wonders, despite the hurt, when she'll get to try love out again. --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer