SERIOUSLY FUNNY
Thought-provoking collection of essays tac les tough subjects with insight and bracing humour
One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter Scaachi Koul Doubleday ERIC VOLMERS
It’s an unusual approach to book promotion, but Scaachi Koul begins our interview by talking about what she feels she isn’t good at.
It’s how she tells her backstory and what led her to writing her debut collection of essays, the compelling and very funny One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter. The Calgary native decided to become a writer after concluding she wasn’t “good at anything else.”
She went into journalism at Ryerson University because she felt she was “also not very good at fiction.” She thought she would “chase ambulances” as a hard-news reporter but didn’t find any opportunities to do that either, which led to her “falling into this weird kind of writing. It got away from me.”
Finally, she says the reason she tackles serious and often dark subjects — racism, sexism, misogyny, body image, rape culture, mortality — with dry wit and bracing humour is because she is ill-equipped to handle them in any other way.
“I don’t know how else to process things,” Koul says. “If I were a stronger person or a better person, I would know how to deal with serious things without being a ( jerk) about it. But my only method is to be kind of an a--hole. This is my best attempt trying to make sense of a lot of it.
“Not everybody finds me funny,” she says. “Some people think I’m really annoying.”
But One Day We’ll All Be Dead is funny. In fact, it can be laugh-outloud funny while still being fearless and thought-provoking. A senior writer at BuzzFeed in Toronto, Koul writes essays where serious topics are filtered through selfdeprecating and witheringly honest personal tales involving her family, friends and early years growing up a brown girl in the lily-white suburbs of Calgary’s southwest — an experience that often left her alienated and angry about the casual, and occasionally not-so-casual, racism and sexism she endured.
But there’s a big di erence between using humour to deal with serious subjects and making light of serious subjects, which is something Koul never does in her book.
“People call me glib a lot because they read the first line, which is a joke, and they don’t read the rest,” Koul says. “We’ll see what ends up being the general consensus on it. But I don’t know if people would listen if you were only serious all the time. The same way I don’t think people will listen it you’re only making snide comments with no purpose all the time.”
So One Day tackles everything from a shopping trip that turns disastrous in the fitting room of a clothing store (Size Me Up) to Koul’s lifelong battle with obtrusive body hair (Mister Beast Man to You, Randor). Inheritance Tax delves into the anxiety and fear passed down to Koul from her parents, who immigrated to Calgary from India nearly 40 years ago.
A Good Egg is a funny but sad look at the crumbling friendship between Koul and a university friend as he descends into alcoholism.
A Good Egg touches on safety and power dynamics, which Koul tackles directly with two of the more unsettling essays. Hunting Season is a perceptive and often jarring look at surveillance and rape culture, arguing it is “a methodical operation so ingrained in
It took me a year to find empathy and sympathy. I was angry . ... I didn’t tell my parents about it because how do I explain witter to my 66-year-old dad?
our public consciousness that we don’t even notice when it’s happen and we rarely call it out even when we do see it.”
In Mute, Koul recounts the social media abuse she received in 2016 after tweeting out a call to her 15,000 or so followers for “not white and not male” contributors to BuzzFeed. The online rage it generated caused her to temporarily leave the platform and fear for her safety and the safety of her family. In the powerful essay, Koul even manages to find a flash of empathy for the pathetic trolls who bombarded her with threats of rape, death and dismemberment.
“It took me a year to find empathy and sympathy,” Koul says. “I was angry. I was really mad. It was a really destabilizing period. I didn’t tell my parents about it because how do I explain Twitter to my 66-year-old dad?
“Somebody had written about me and he found it and he called me panicked because he didn’t understand what was going on. I had to get them unlisted from the phone book, I had to make sure their address wasn’t anywhere. I had to do the same for the rest of my family.
“There was a period where I didn’t leave the house because there were people who were trying to figure out where my o ce was. If you can figure out where my o ce was and if you wait and you see me leave, you could follow me home very easily. So I didn’t go anywhere for awhile because I didn’t want people to know where I live.”
What may be the funniest of the essays, though, is Aus-piss-ee-ous, which reveals that Koul is equally ba ed by the culture her parents left behind. Centred on the marathon wedding of a female cousin in India, it’s a surreal and colourful look at family dynamics, sexism and the disorienting e ects of being dropped into an unfamiliar culture.
Koul’s relationship with her family, particularly her father, is at the centre of many of the essays. Each begins with an actual email exchange between the two. Her parents still live in the same house Koul grew up in and her father seems to be enjoying the famous-by-association status his rising-star daughter has brought him.
“His head has got huge in the last five days,” she says. “I think he likes that he had an influence on the work. He hasn’t read it. He will not read it. I think he knows better. Do I want my dad to read this nice essay I wrote about him or do I want him to read about my vagina? Well, he doesn’t know how to only do one. Either he reads it or he doesn’t read it. And I think it’s for the best that he doesn’t.”