How I Wrote This Book: Scaachi Koul’s “Sucker Punch”

A new Q&A series on craft & creativity.

Okay yes Hate Read launches on Monday, but ALSO real quick: I’ve been wanting to bring the Q&A format back to Deez Links for a while (remember Deez Interviews?), and I’ve also wanted an excuse to talk about ~the craft~ with fellow authors. BOOM, problem solved, we now have a new Q&A series called How I Wrote This Book.

First up on the lineup is the inimitable Scaachi Koul, who I originally met during our time at BuzzFeed (she was a classical BuzzFeed News type, in terms of being both an incredible poster, reporter, and writer; I still think about her review of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal” all the time).

Earlier this month, Scaachi published her second book, Sucker Punch, which technically does fall into the rather in vogue “divorce memoir” category, but as with all things Scaachi, it’s so much more. The NYT loves it, and there’s a great excerpt in The Cut to peep at. We got on the phone last week to discuss how the book literally came together; here’s our conversation about how Scaachi Koul wrote Sucker Punch.

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Do you remember when you first started thinking about the idea for this book?

I unfortunately remember every agonizing minute. I sold this book seven years ago, right after I wrote my first book, as a collection of essays about the utility and futility of conflict. I was going to write all these different essays about different fights that I had witnessed or participated in. I had political arguments, arguments with self, arguments with my family — all these different threads. I do think there's still a thread of that in Sucker Punch for sure; it is a book about conflict. But when I sold that book, I hadn't even gotten married yet. I think I was maybe engaged; my life of being a wife had just started.

Then the pandemic happened, so all my reporting got completely blown out. I was supposed to go to India in March 2020, and then my parents got stuck there. It took me months to get them home. It was just a disaster. Every plan I had for that book was destroyed either by sociopolitical events, a plague, or my personal life, because I was having a disaster experience in my marriage. How was I going to write about conflict if I was having so much of it?

I remember all of it. I had this idea ages ago, and I clearly was trying to interrogate something and could not figure out why. So for me, this is almost a decade I’ve spent thinking about this.

How quickly did you scrap the original plan?

I was banging my head against a brick wall the whole time. I would not relinquish it! And everybody was like, Why don't you take a break? I would send my Canadian editor passages, and she would graciously be like, Hey, this sucks. This is not good. I kept trying and nothing worked. It felt like the universe was against me.

I remember there was one weekend when I was still married, and we were in the pandemic. I had this very industrious weekend where I locked myself away and wrote 20,000 words in a weekend, and then on the Monday after the weekend, my laptop crashed, and the only document it took was that one.

Oh my God.