LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: In her new book of essays, "Sucker Punch," Slate writer Scaachi Koul is going through a lot. Her marriage is falling apart. She's grappling with her self-worth, family pressures and a rape she never really dealt with. Through it all, her instinct, since childhood, was always to fight, even to show love, until now.
SCAACHI KOUL: I'm, like, angrier than ever, and I have a capacity for conflict that is the highest it's ever been. But I fight the least that I ever have.
FADEL: Now, Koul says she's far from Zen, but she doesn't want conflict all the time anymore.
KOUL: I do think I have at least learned a couple of things that I just won't do anymore. And I don't think I will any longer fight in relationships where I feel like I'm not being witnessed.
FADEL: Well, how long have you been divorced now?
KOUL: Three years.
FADEL: Three years.
KOUL: Yeah.
FADEL: So how is it?
KOUL: I mean, I love divorce.
FADEL: (Laughter).
KOUL: Being - like, I think it's great. Nothing has given me more in this life than being divorced.
FADEL: So much of this book is - or at least as I was reading, it's watching you and really relating to working through your relationship with men, your own self-worth, writing about your divorce, about your rape when you're barely of age and never really confronting it, about figuring out how to be alone. Did writing this book help you find a path to a calmer or more peaceful place?
KOUL: Yeah, it was the only path. I was really disoriented after I started the divorce process. Every possible future building I've done in my head is not happening. I have just had to break bad news to everyone I know, 'cause then you got to tell your friends. I had to tell my family. Like, that's a painful conversation.
FADEL: And so you ultimately settled on making your divorce kind of the center of this book in some ways.
KOUL: Yeah, I think divorce offered me a framework for rethinking everything. Like, I started getting tattooed after my divorce, and I remember showing my mom, and she just would roll her eyes and, like, insult me in four or five languages and then move on with her day. If I had done that before my divorce, she would have, like, been on the phone to God. She would have had a meltdown about it. But I've already done the thing that scared her so much, and it's fine (laughter), you know? Like...
FADEL: So you got some freedom out of it.
KOUL: Oh, yeah. A lot. A ton. It was the freedom I think I was trying to get before, and I couldn't. I had to do it this way.
FADEL: Something that really, I think, was so vulnerable of you was the way that you talked about your own rape. And...
KOUL: Yeah.
FADEL: ...The need to talk to the person who did it to you, who - to reconnect to that person, to search for something in them that would maybe make you feel OK about it. I mean...
KOUL: Yeah.
FADEL: ...It was relatable and fascinating to read you write about it in that way.
KOUL: When I sort of sat down and thought about, like, OK, I'm writing this book about divorce, and I'm writing a book about ultimately what I view as these betrayals...
FADEL: Yeah.
KOUL: ...Of me and to me and by me. You know, I'm committing them to myself, as well, and to other people. I really did wake up on his 30th birthday and feel it. I felt like we were moving into a new phase of our lives, and I felt like - I think I almost felt resentful at the idea, what if he could forget? That doesn't seem fair. I don't get to. So I think it started as I just would like to make sure he remembers. I think he did. I think he did.
FADEL: Yeah. Your mom...
KOUL: Yeah.
FADEL: ...Is a big part of this book, too. And you dedicate the book to, quote, "my mom, obviously."
KOUL: Obviously.
FADEL: How did she influence "Sucker Punch"?
KOUL: Divorce would have been very easy if I never had to tell my mother. When I left, it felt a little like I was leaving for both of us. She had, like, a consensual arranged marriage. She, you know, agreed to it, but she didn't know my dad very well. She got married at 24. Her mom got married at 14. So I also really abided by I met someone young, and I followed through. I did what I was supposed to do. And so it felt like I was taking her with me through the divorce in good and bad.
FADEL: Yeah.
KOUL: And then her illness landed right after my divorce was finalized. And then that felt cosmic and cruel and unyielding and felt like something, again, we had to do in lockstep.
FADEL: So it is a collection of essays. And the first essay in this book, the first chapter, is called Parvati Stands in Flames. And the last, Kali Starts a Fire. So first, if you could just describe the differences between these two Hindu goddesses and how they represent your own evolution.
KOUL: I will also say this is my very loose interpretation of these fables. I, in my divorce, was thinking so much about all of these, like, these female, these Hindu deities. And so I kept thinking about stories about Parvati and her transition. Parvati is kind of, like, the most human version of herself. And she falls in love with a boy, and her parents don't want her to marry him, even though he is also celestial. The story my mom used to tell me is that she stood in angry meditation for a thousand years and waited until her parents said, OK, fine, you can marry him. And they did.
And then, through the book, we kind of visit Parvati, and as she changes, she becomes Durga, who is more of a fighter. She spooks people. She is the deity that comes in, and she ends the universe. So, you know, Hindus believe in reincarnation. We believe the universe basically restarts. But at a certain point, it doesn't. After she effectively kills everybody, she cannot access Parvati again. She cannot get back to who she was. And so her husband, one of the gods - I'm not using his name because he's not important - he throws himself at her feet to, like, knock her out of it because he is now going to show her this show of devotion. He's going to offer it back to her. And when he does it, then she shrinks back down to size.
FADEL: Wow.
KOUL: So even in, like, the versions I had heard as a kid, these stories are still about marriage and a shared duty to each other. But they are obviously taught differently to girls and to boys, and they're taught differently to different people in different families. These were not stories that I internalized until I left, and then I started really thinking about them and thinking about what it meant to start a fire.
FADEL: Scaachi Koul is a senior writer at Slate and the author of "Sucker Punch." Thank you so much for talking to us about the book.
KOUL: Thanks for having me.
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