Scaachi Koul, the author of “One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of this Will Matter” on writing online and at length — with a bonus explanation of Canada.
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Overview
One of NPR's Best Books of the Year
A DEBUT COLLECTION OF FIERCE, FUNNY ESSAYS ABOUT GROWING UP THE DAUGHTER OF INDIAN IMMIGRANTS IN WESTERN CULTURE, ADDRESSING SEXISM, STEREOTYPES, AND THE UNIVERSAL MISERIES OF LIFE
In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.
With a sharp eye and biting wit, incomparable rising star and cultural observer Scaachi Koul offers a hilarious, scathing, and honest look at modern life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250121073 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2017 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 704 KB |
About the Author
Scaachi Koul was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and is a culture writer for BuzzFeed. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Hairpin, The Globe and Mail, and Jezebel. One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter is her first book. She lives in Toronto.
Scaachi Koul was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and is a culture writer for BuzzFeed. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Hairpin, The Globe and Mail, and Jezebel. One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter is her first book. She lives in Toronto.
Scaachi Koul was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and is a culture writer for BuzzFeed. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Hairpin, The Globe and Mail, and Jezebel. One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter is her first book. She lives in Toronto.
Read an Excerpt
One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of this Will Matter
By Scaachi Koul
Picador
Copyright © 2017 Scaachi KoulAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-12107-3
CHAPTER 1
Inheritance Tax
Only idiots aren't afraid of flying. Planes are inherently unnatural; your body isn't supposed to be launched into the sky, and few people comprehend the science that keeps them from tumbling into the ocean. Do you know how many planes crash every year? Neither do I, but I know the answer is more than one, WHICH IS ENOUGH.
My boyfriend finds my fear of flying hilarious at best and deeply frustrating at worst. For my twenty-fourth birthday, he booked us a trip to Southeast Asia for two weeks, the farthest I've been from home in more than a decade. Plenty of people take a gap year between high school and university to travel, or spend a summer back-packing through Europe to "find" themselves. (A bullshit statement if ever there was one. Where do you think you'll be? No one finds anything in France except bread and pretension, and frankly, both of those are in my lap right now.) I never did this. I talked about wanting to, sure, listing all the places I would go one day, hoping to have my photo taken next to a crumbling edifice in Brazil or with a charming street merchant in Laos. When I was thirteen, my mom asked me where I'd get the money to travel and I said, "From you, of course." She laughed me straight out of her kitchen nook. Travelling tells the world that you're educated, that you're willing to take risks, that you have earned your condescension. But do you know what my apartment has that no other place does? All my stuff. All the things that let me dull out the reminders of my human existence, that let me forget that the world is full of dark, impenetrable crags. I have, I think, a healthy fear of dying, and marching forward into the uncharted is almost asking for it. But it was my birthday, and my beautiful idiot boyfriend was offering to take me someplace exciting. He suggested Thailand and Vietnam, because he likes the sun and I like peanut sauces. I agreed, my haunches already breaking out in a very familiar rash.
As we made our way from Toronto to Chicago, then Chicago to Tokyo, then Tokyo to Bangkok, he was a paragon of serenity. (He's older than me by more than a decade, and acts it whenever we do something new, largely because, comparatively, almost everything is new to me and nothing is new to him.) He was a latchkey kid, permitted to wander his small town in the '80s and '90s in a way that feels nostalgic to him and like the beginning of a documentary about child abduction to me. He smoked and drank and cried and laughed and was freer at twelve than I have ever been. While our plane started to taxi, I squeezed his meaty forearm as if I was tenderizing a ham hock — rubbing his white skin red and twisting his blond arm hair into little knots — and he just gazed dreamily out the window. When we took off, my throat started to close and I wanted to be home, stay home, never leave home.
I wasn't raised with a fear of flying. My parents were afraid of plenty of things that would likely never affect us — murderers lurking in our backyard, listeria in our sandwich meat, vegans — but dying on a plane was all too mundane for them. We used to take plenty of trips together and separately, and lengthy air travel played an unavoidable role in their origin story. They emigrated from India in the late 1970s and flew back for visits every few years. For vacations or my dad's business trips, they flew to St. Thomas and Greece and Montreal and New York. Mom didn't like bugs and Papa didn't like small dogs, but I don't remember either of them being particularly fearful.
I wasn't always afraid of flying either. When I travelled with my parents as a kid, air travel was exciting. I got to buy new notebooks and travel games, and flight attendants packed cookies and chips and mini cans of ginger ale in airsickness bags and handed them out to the kids mid-flight. 9/11 hadn't happened, so our family wasn't yet deemed suspicious at Calgary's airport. I once loudly asked my brother while standing in a security queue how, exactly, people made bombs out of batteries while waving around a pack of thirty AAs intended for a video game. My parents let me eat a whole Toblerone bar and then I threw up in a translucent gift bag while we waited in line to board. I was alive!
Flying became a necessity by the time I was seventeen, the only way to stay connected with my family rather than a conduit for mile-high vomiting. When I graduated from high school, instead of doing what so many of my classmates did — a month in Italy here, three months in Austria there — I moved across the country almost immediately to start university. If I wanted to see my parents (and I did, as my homesickness burst wide open the second my parents dropped me off at my residence), I would have to fly. Three, sometimes four times a year, I'd take a four-hour flight to see people who I knew were at least legally obligated to love me.
But by my early twenties, years into this routine, something shifted and made room for fear to set in. Turbulence wasn't fun anymore; it didn't feel like a ride, it felt like the beginning of my early death. I'd start crying during take-off, sure that the plane would plummet. Flight attendants assumed I was travelling for a funeral and would offer extra orange juice or cranberry cookies to keep me from opening the emergency exit. Before I take off now, I text or email or call anyone I think would be sad about my death and tell them I love them and that the code for my debit card is 3264 and please help yourself to the $6.75 that may or may not still be in there, depending on if I purchased a preflight chewy pizza-pretzel, the World's Saddest Final Meal. My stomach churns and my palms sweat and I think about all the things I should have said and done before this plane nosedives and the army finds parts of my body scattered across the Prairies. My legs in Fort McMurray, my arms in Regina, my anus somewhere in Edmonton.
* * *
When you're a kid, your parents are the bravest people in the world, but my parents' provenance still feels impossibly brave to me. My father didn't exactly "tell" my mother he wanted to emigrate from India before they got together. That's the way she remembers it, that it was only after they got engaged that she found out he had paperwork ready to apply for permanent residency on the other side of the planet. My dad first saw her at his cousin's house — my mom was her friend — and was flustered by her beauty. Ask my dad and he'll wax poetic about my mother's cheekbones, her rich eyes, her long hair, how he needed to get to know her. My mom didn't even know he was there. Years ago, when I asked her about her first impression upon actually seeing my dad, she merely pursed her lips and continued folding towels, saying, "I thought he was okay." This, the great love affair that spawned me, a woman who would one day get both of her hands stuck in two different salsa jars at the same time.
My dad asked her father for her hand (and the rest of her, presumably) when she was just eighteen, about to head off to university away from their small town in Kashmir. My grandfather said no, but to try again when she was older. He was a police sergeant, but a gentle guy who rarely raised his voice or grew upset. My mom did not inherit his calmness — he yelled at her once when she was twelve and she felt so wronged that she launched a hunger strike, one that lasted entire hours. He apologized by placing his hat at her feet, begging her to please just eat something. (I did the same at eleven, but my parents just shrugged and said there were bagels in the fridge when I was ready — brown people don't know what to do with bread.) When Mom was twenty-two, my dad was approved, and they were engaged and married within a year. Another year and some later, they had my brother. Soon after that, my dad moved to Southern Ontario; his family waited months before joining him.
But before this, there was the big death that marked Papa just after the birth of his first child in India. My brother was small enough to sleep between his paternal grandparents on the flat roof of their home during a mercilessly hot night. My grandmother, in her fifties at the time, woke up and took him inside to change his diaper. When she returned, her husband didn't wake up: he had died of a massive heart attack in his sleep. Mom says they found him with his hand on his heart. My dad was only thirty. He doesn't talk about it. We don't ask.
My father's mother, Behenji, lived with us in Calgary when I was young but she hated the cold and didn't speak any English and I didn't understand who or what she was. She opted to leave after a few years, something that infuriated Papa because wasn't it his job, as the eldest son, to take care of her? It didn't matter that she was generally in good health or always prickly or maintained her usual routines, he feared for her constantly. Near the end, she started to get confused and would forget things or people or where she was. Papa would sit in his armchair, clenching his teeth, ruminating on how he'd abandoned her years before. "I've asked her to stay put until I come, but who knows," Papa said to me, two years before she died, as if he could tell her body not to retreat. "If she has to go, I hope she goes in my arms. That will be the culmination of a life. Of a life well lived. A hard life. She had a hard life." He was on the phone with me at the time, speaking to me mostly in sighs and rueful grunts, a language I've since learned to speak myself.
Behenji lived into her eighties, thirty-odd years after her husband had passed, dying when my dad was already in his mid-sixties. Now, he does long-distance running daily and takes multivitamins the size of horse tranquilizers every morning. He has high blood pressure and high cholesterol and does everything he can to try to reverse what his blood has given him. He says he's pre-diabetic now, so every morning starts with a spoonful of fenugreek seeds, which I tried just once — they tasted so strongly of death that eating them seemed more like an omen than a cure. After his long runs, he does yoga in his bedroom, flipping over to do headstands next to his dresser. (His headstands are getting weaker the older he gets, though maybe avoid mentioning that if you see him.) Sometimes he recruits my niece to stand on his back, cracking his bones, and he lets out a delighted, "Ahhh-ha-ha-ha-haaa."
Mom talks about moving to Canada as though my father had requested she start wearing fun hats. Why not try it? she thought, instead of This fucking lunatic wants me to go to a country made of ice and casual racism. Before I was born, my parents returned from their vacations to their new Canadian home with photos of my mother perched precipitously close to the edge of a cruise ship or drinking a flute of bubbles in a dimly lit restaurant. Mom never half-assed things; she had a kind of blind faith that made it easy to follow her. When I was little, too young to know how to swim, Mom took me to swimming pools and would wade into the deep end and let me hang off her shoulders like a baby koala. She rented Sea-Doos in Kelowna and dragged me onto the back of them, driving too fast for my comfort. Mom put her hand flat on a pan to check if it was hot enough (though could never answer my eternal question: What if it's too hot?). Mom sucked marrow out of a lamb bone with shocking fervour, then stuck her tongue through the hollow to tease me about how truly, deeply gross I found it. Mom made rotis from scratch, kneading the atta with her hands and then dragging a knife across her skin to gather the excess, laughing at seven-year-old me recoiling in horror. Mom's arthritis got worse but she kept cooking rogan josh so spicy it ripped the roof of your mouth clean off, whipping a wooden spoon around a pressure cooker with her aching wrist. Mom yelled. Mom told you how she felt, when she felt it, as much and as often as she needed to tell you. Mom cried all the time, happy or sad, her tears running a moat around a mole just under her eye, her face like a Shiva Lingam for feelings. And Mom was not afraid of you. When Papa was angry, or afraid, or nervous, or happy, or thrilled, he just seethed quietly because it was all too much to handle. Mom, on the other hand, hugged you with her arms and shoulders and suffocating bosom, burying you in all her soft, cool flesh. That, or she would kill you. These were your options.
And yet even when my mom was at her bravest, I was gearing up for death. I invented diseases for myself and was sure they'd kill me. By the time I was seven, I started running my fingers up and down my forearm, inspecting my skin and the dark blue veins I could see through my flesh. None of the other girls I knew had visible veins, not like these. My parents didn't have them, neither did my brother, nor any of my glamorous, tall, busty cousins with their long, sleek hair and full lips and did I mention their massive boobs? It was vein cancer, I decided — nothing else could explain the cerulean blue of these veins, how close they were to the surface, how they ran all the way up my arm and would appear and disappear across my flat chest. I never told my parents about it and quietly accepted death as I wrote my "Last Willing Testament" on a pink heart-shaped notepad. (This phase never entirely passed. At a dinner party a few years ago, I was seated next to an emergency room doctor. I stuck my arm under her nose and asked, "What does this look like to you?" She said it was nothing, but speaking as someone who once went to a university with a pre-med program, I'm pretty sure I know a little more than she does.)
But even my worst dramatics weren't all that bad. I was still a teenager and prone to typical boundary-pushing. I lied about dates and friends and drinking. I smoked cigarettes and wore poorly applied makeup. I was doing what you're supposed to do when you're young and hateful, and it was all okay because I was home with my mom. She yelled at me with unbelievable bluster, threatened to murder me in such a subtle fashion that "no one will know" or with such flare that "everyone will see." She'd chase me around the house with a wooden spoon, threatening a whipping if I ran my mouth one more time. None of it led to much of anything. I was never in danger. Nothing bad can happen to you if you're with your mom. Your mom can stop a bullet from lodging in your heart. She can prop you up when you can't. Your mom is your blood and bone before your body even knows how to make any.
* * *
I have never had to be brave. Bravery is for parents and people who get tattoos in another language or dare to eat pinkish chicken. But my boyfriend, my Hamhock, he has always been brave. It was written somewhere in the skies that he would be made of steel and grit, he would take on every dare or bet, he would hurt himself and brush it off because the brave don't worry about their bodies or their brains. He once got into a bad bike accident that shattered his foot and wrist. He still tried to drive himself to the hospital. At my most self-pitying, I have dreams of drowning in vast bodies of water, my near-dead corpse being dragged back to the surface by the hulking meat of my boyfriend's arms.
So while Hamhock mumbled something to me about how nice the beaches on Ko Phi Phi would be, I felt the plane make an insignificant but intestine-tightening dip before soaring even higher. Hamhock is all the things I am not. He never wanted a life inside. He likes to bike and run and touch and eat and dive headfirst into trouble. (Later on this trip, he would convince me that buying some mysterious snake-fermented wine would be a good idea. We took shots on my birthday. He threw up immediately.) His laugh is high-pitched — like a Pillsbury Doughboy that has fireworks for arms — and I've learned to be wary of it since it signals some kind of fun and/or threat. But the choice with him has always been to watch him leave or to pack a bag and some disinfectant and maybe a pouch of that malaria medication and walk into the unknown, together.
The trip was intended to be restful, I think. It was just long enough to see a few beaches and temples and eat some noodles and get drunk four or five times. I knew two weeks in a foreign country with their weird bugs and aggressive sunlight would be a challenge. I just didn't think it would be a catalogue of all my greatest fears.
Spiders scuttling on the ceiling of our hotel room were the size of my fists. Mystery bugs feasted on my calves and made my left leg swell so much that I couldn't walk (at least, not without complaining). I'm afraid of water, so naturally, several of our destinations were accessible only by boat. And not real boats with life jackets and horns but dinky wooden ones with a motor too big to be supported by a vessel. They looked like toys that would capsize if you mounted them too quickly. They sped too fast and would tilt and rock and splash you with water. The paint was peeling, the metal was rusted, the seats were barely nailed down. We'd get too close to other boats and scrape their sides. During the rides, Hamhock would talk about how much he'd love a beer; I wanted to see licences and insurance papers and Thai safety regulations. And while Hamhock tilted his head back to let the sun wash over his skin, I clutched any surface of the craft I could as it crashed down against the water. I'd let out little "eep"s while trying not to look horrified. Now and then, he'd turn to me and ask, "Are you okay?" and I would yell, "YES, THANK YOU, I AM VERY FINE AND CASUAL."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of this Will Matter by Scaachi Koul. Copyright © 2017 Scaachi Koul. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Inheritance Tax — 1
Size Me Up — 33
Fair and Lovely — 53
Aus-pee-ee-ous — 77
Mute — 111
A Good Egg — 139
Hunting Season — 163
Mister Beast Man to You, Randor — 175
Tawi River, Elbow River — 195
Anyway — 213
Interviews
The Essay's Not Dead Yet: Scaachi Koul Talks with Jason Diamond
Not every writer would publish a column, as Scaachi Koul did in 2015 for BuzzFeed, containing thirteen "inexplicable yet endearing emails" from her father, among them a missive that states: "It is your sciniltallting [sic] writing replete with ascerbic [sic] wit and condescending disdain for everything under the sun which makes everybody hold you in high esteem."
The truth of that assessment is palpable throughout Koul's book debut, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, in which the twenty-six-year-old Canadian essayist, the first-generation daughter of Kashmiri immigrants, takes on weighty subjects — appropriation, patriarchy, racism, sexism, sexuality, rape culture, the immigrant experience, personal identity . . . and her father — with an unsparing eye for human foible and an attitude suffused with sardonic, misanthropic humor.
In another essay last May for BuzzFeed, where she writes regularly about culture, Koul reflected, "I don't know why any of us write; it is a terrible sickness." But her ever-increasing fan base is glad that she does.
On July 6, 2017, Koul discussed the above-stated matters in a lively dialogue with Jason Diamond (author of the memoir Searching for John Hughes, editor at Rollingstone.com, and founder of Volume 1: Brooklyn), before responding to audience questions at the Barnes & Noble branch at Eighty-second Street and Broadway on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Jason Diamond: You write about having this fear of flying, and yet you've been touring so much. Has it gotten worse?
Scaachi Koul: It's getting worse for sure. It's also getting worse because I have to come to the States a lot, and going through border security as an ethnic with, like, no real reason to be here, is never good. I'm here for a few weeks this trip, so I didn't have a return flight. When I came in they were like, "What do you do?" "Oh, I'm a writer." "Are you?" I could bring up this book I wrote, but they wouldn't trust it.
JD: Do you think they'd like the title?
SK: I do not tell Border Security the title of my book.
JD: How did you come to the title? It's possibly the title of the year.
SK: In the book, there's an essay about going to my cousin's wedding in India. She was having a bad week, because weddings are a week there. She looked at me, really exhausted, and was like, "This is so physically painful and emotionally painful." I said, "It's OK, because you're going to be dead, and then none of this will matter." My aunts didn't love that, but I thought it was apt.
JD: Where did you come up with the idea to write a book of personal essays?
SK: I've got a couple of things in my favor. One is that I'm a narcissist. So right out of the gate, it's like: Cool — ready to talk about myself again. But I'm also good at it. That's just lucky. But the other side of it is, I wanted to write a book that would talk about things I didn't get to read about when I was younger. I didn't read a ton of nonfiction about women when I was younger. I certainly didn't read nonfiction about brown women, and I definitely didn't read about, you know, Canadian brown women pulling hairs out of their nipples — which is a story in this collection. That never really came up for me. I remember thinking how nice would it have been to have had that when I was even twenty; something that gives you a guide of, you know, your life is hell, but it's going to be OK eventually . . . hopefully.
JD: As I was reading, I was thinking that children of immigrants grow up with values from where their parents are from, but their parents also are trying to raise them as a Canadian or an American. At some point you have to rebel. Every kid rebels, but I think it's different when your parents are not from here. I'm wondering at what point you started thinking, "I want to be different than my parents."
SK: Eleven or twelve. Puberty. I think a big part of it was noticing boys. That wasn't a talk I got. No one sat me down and told me, "This is how somebody has a baby." You just sort of figure it out because your mother will never tell you. But I never realized how much access I had to information, compared to the rest of my family. My mom recently told me a story that her mother got married when she was fifteen, before she had her period, and then she got it when she turned sixteen, and her husband had to tell her what it was, because none of the women in her family would tell her. Now I think about my niece, who is the first biracial person in our family. And I marvel at the amount of information she has.
But in terms of feeling different from them, I think it was inevitable. I was being raised in an atmosphere where I was being tugged in two directions. English was my first language, and I never learned any of the languages my parents knew. They wanted me to understand it, but they never taught it to me because they wanted me to integrate. But they didn't want me to assimilate. It becomes a very complicated push and pull. I still haven't figured that out.
JD: You talk about growing up in Calgary, and how there was a pretty large Indian community, but you say you didn't feel like they were your people. Did you ever start to feel like they were?
SK: Not when I lived there. I left when I was seventeen. Calgary is . . . oh, I love explaining Canada. Calgary is in the West. It's in the prairies. They make oats and cows. It's a very conservative white area.
No, I never really felt like we connected with them. We didn't live in the neighborhood where they had all settled. We lived in a white neighborhood. I don't know if that was a conscious choice on my dad's part when they moved. He wanted us to be Canadian. He wanted us to be North American. So a good way to do that is to make you live with other white people . . . I mean, with white people . . . See how easy it was to slip into that? Oh, I'm glad he's not here.
JD: Was there ever a point, like, later on, when you started trying to maybe feel more of a connection?
SK: Not until I moved to Toronto, which is on the other side of the country, basically.
JD: Your father is everywhere in the book.
SK: He's exhausting.
JD: How do you describe your relationship with your father to people? Even if you haven't read the book, if you follow Scaachi on Twitter, you start to realize he's this character who . . .
SK: He's always calling. My dad is sixty-seven. He is the oldest in his family, which by brown standards means he is a fucking pain, because the eldest boys are so spoiled and so needy. So he's, like, needy, but he's the patriarch, and he's very funny but he gets mad easily, and he's aging, and he's not OK with it . . . He's like if your pet could speak to you all the time and tell you every need and anguish they have, and if they also had a cell phone and texted them to you. I love him a lot, but he's 90 percent of the work that I do.
JD: He wrote your bio.
SK: He did.
JD: He says you stole some of his material, I think.
SK: See what I mean? Like, so dramatic. He routinely calls and asks for a portion of my advance. His new thing is, he calls and says, "What's the number?" by which he means "What's the number of books sold?" — as if I have that information every day. Then, if I have the number, by chance (because I will have to text my editor and say, "My father is asking what's the number"), he'll ask me if that's better or worse than some other author, and it's always someone that's unreasonable. Franzen. He wants to know if Oprah's read it. I haven't talked to her in a WHILE, so I'm not sure.
JD: For some reason, I kept opening the book to the text or email where he mentions Suge Knight.
SK: He loves Suge Knight. And he doesn't know who Suge Knight is. He sent an email that says something about how Suge Knight "upset the humdrum routine of everyday life." I was like, "He might be a murderer." My dad's response is, "Murder is necessary to social order." This is his vein. Should I read the bio?
JD: You can read whatever you want.
SK: I emailed him . . . This is a real email. People always tell me that I made this up, as if I have the goddamn time. I emailed him on November 24th of last year and said, "My publisher wants you to write my author bio for the back of the book." He answered with: "Who would have the editorial control? I need some ironclad guarantee that they do not turn what I write, which would be insightful and very succinct, into some post- pubescent pablum." I replied, "I have spoken to my editor, and she has guaranteed that she will not edit you." That was my mistake. Then he says, "You must correct it for punctuation, which is elites trying to keep bourgeoisie like us down." Here it goes.
"The author of this book, Scaachi Molita Koul, is my daughter, born when Wife and I were at the cusp of entering middle age, but we were deliriously happy to welcome her after a particularly painful pregnancy. I am positive, or I would like to believe that she got a lot of material from my musings, which I expressed out loud to humor her. It could also be that I was vicariously living through her. I am almost certain she has presented me in a very poignant and loving way, or, again, I could be delusional. If I am presented as a crank or an Indian version of Archie Bunker, then my revenge would be complete, because I named her Scaachi with a silent 'c'."
He's a lot. And that's every day.
JD: In one part of the book, you talk about how you're able to sort of blend within Canadian media.
SK: Oh, yeah. Canadian media is a lot smaller, obviously, than the U.S. — we have a lot fewer people and fewer outlets. And it is, by nature, designed to be a lot whiter than it is here. What ends up happening is that the very few people who get picked to enter that space are being allowed because of those gatekeepers thinking this crosses off the diversity box without actually addressing any of the issues.
A few weeks ago a bunch of Canadian editors of very large newspapers were talking on Twitter at, like, eleven o'clock at night on a Thursday about how they were going to set up a fund for what writer could best culturally appropriate from another group of people. Which is insane. They also came up with, like, three grand in an hour, which is, like: If you can do that, just give it to me! I'll do something with it. That's a great snapshot of what's going on in Canada in terms of how people talk about indigenous people and people of color, and how the media treats those voices as complete tokens without actually using them for any good. Because I'm fair- skinned, they'll let me come in and I can do certain things. But if I say too much, I get in trouble. And I get in trouble all the time.
JD: I know that a lot of women in media deal with this, but you've taken an unnecessary amount of abuse. With all you've had to go through, was there any sort of apprehension about writing this very personal book?
SK: I have a real impulse control problem, so I don't know how to not do stuff. As soon as I decide I'm going to do it, that's it. That's a bad thing sometimes, but in these cases it's probably beneficial.
A book costs money. So if you would like to yell at me but you would also like to give me $16, I encourage it. Feel free. But most people aren't going to pay the entry fee to call me the c-word. If you already don't like me, this book just affirms what you already believe. If you think that I believe in white genocide — well, you're not going to get any different information from this. Good luck! So it hasn't felt any different.
JD: There was a really smart New Yorker article a few weeks ago about the end of the personal essay boom. Did you read it?
SK: Yes.
JD: What did you think? There are two kinds of personal essays, in my opinion. There are really horrible personal essays. But then, there are great ones, and you have a book full of them.
SK: It's my understanding that the person who wrote that just got a deal to write an essay collection. So they're not over by any stretch. I think her argument is that there was a time a little while ago when a lot of media outlets were buying kind of easy- disposable personal essays because they were cheap, so you could go to somebody and say, "I need to fulfill these diversity quotas, so I'm going to talk to a bunch of women of color and say, 'Please write about being a woman of color.' " It's an easy thing to do. It's low labor, because you don't always have to do research.
Some of those essays were really great. I was probably a part of that boon before this book came out, and I worked in that space, too.
JD: A lot of great writers came out of that.
SK: Totally. But at the same time, people write essays who are maybe not ready. They don't always get the editing time they need. So you've got this mass of essays that are terrible, but they've been produced because they're easy to make.
But I don't know if you can say that essays are done, because people have been writing essays forever. I've made this joke 100 times, but dudes write essays about their wangs all the time and say, like, "This is my opus." It's not looked at as this trend thing. It's just a book. But for some reason, as soon as people whom we don't consider to be the majority — women or women of color or non-binary people or queer people — start writing essay collections, those groups get lumped into this idea that diversity is a passing trend.
JD: You've been touring, doing events since the book came out in the U.S. in May. Can you pinpoint one thing that people have come up and talked to you or emailed you about?
SK: I notice that a lot of brown girls tell me they'r glad there is something that explained things that they were having happen to them, so it gives them some sense they're not entirely isolated. A lot of dudes have emailed me, like, "Oh, I'm terrible; I had no idea." That's been refreshing. But I think people find their own thing from it. A lot of people who have had bad relationships with their dads said that it either gave them some comfort because their dad isn't around any more, or it's gotten them to call him or whatever else. So he's done one good thing.
JD: We have you!
SK: Well, my mother did that.
JD: He's one-half.
SK: Well, who knows?
JD: Do we have any questions from the audience?
Woman: Did your father read the book?
SK: No. He did not. He thought about it, and I was, like, "You could . . . but should you?" What really stressed him out was when I said, "Well, there's an essay in there about my body" — he was, like, "Never mind." He hasn't bought it. He keeps putting it on hold at the Calgary Public Library, because he thinks that (and I quote), "It generates buzz." He puts it on hold, then he lets me know when the hold comes down, and then he drops the hold.
Man: I'm interested in whether you had an audience in mind when you wrote this book.
SK: I wrote the book for brown girls, and then I thought everybody else would be icing. There are words that I don't translate. I figure that's a calling card for people who don't get a lot of stuff. We don't get a lot of stuff in pop culture. We don't get a lot of stuff outside what our families have given us, and we don't get to see it out in the world. So that's fine. That said, my editors, who are white, would come to me and say, like, "This needs to be explained." Which is good. I don't want to write a book that can't be read widely. But generally, I'd say I wrote it for people who look like me. I figure that if you come to a book with an open mind, you're going to be able to find a way through. I'm hoping that happened with this.
Woman: You said "editors." How many editors did you work with?
SK: Three. I have one in the U.S. and two in Canada who edited it, because we sold the book first in Canada.
Woman: Was the editorial feedback different from your U.S. editor? SK: No. They seemed to agree — with one exception. My U.S. editor wanted me to take out one joke. I refused. It was a really dumb joke about flying over Canada, if I fell out of a plane (because I'm afraid of flying), and that my anus would end up in Edmonton. "This doesn't make sense here; they won't get it." "I don't care! It is an important joke . . . It's funny! But the reason why it's extra-funny in Canada is because Edmonton is garbage, but also because I'm from Calgary, and Calgary and Edmonton hate each other. So there's layers.
Woman: Being a brown woman, do you ever get the silly "But you speak so well"?
SK: Constantly. Literally all the time. Canadians are such racists. Like, don't worry. We're all messed up, too. It's not better. It's just quieter, I guess.
JD: You have health insurance.
SK: Yeah. We have health insurance, French is mandatory in grade seven, and it's racist.
Woman: I read a lot of dumb white men. That's all we read in high school. Any women, any people of color, any women of color who are contemporary writers that you would recommend?
SK: I keep talking about Samantha Irby, which is kind of biased because she blurbed my book, but the one that just came out, We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, is so funny and so gross. I'd never met anybody who talks about poop more than me — and she does. Vivek Shraya has a collection of poetry called Even This Page Is White. I don't read a lot of poetry, but I really like that book.
Man: Samantha Irby and you incorporate humor into your essays, which is often seen as a no-no in literature . . .
SK: Is it?
Man: Because so many people want to be taken seriously.
SK: Oh, I don't.
Man: But if you're not a part of the canon, you might be afraid to make that step towards humor. In theory, if you're a woman writer, you're already "not taken seriously," so why add another layer of a thing that won't be taken seriously?
SK: I'm not good at being serious. The book proposal was basically like a knock-knock joke book, and the first draft was joke-heavy. My editors were like, "Maybe you should have an argument, not just write forty jokes about your weird vagina." What this ended up being is better, for sure. But my tendency isn't to go from serious and then add some jokes. It's the other way around. That's hopefully why it seems funny without being forced.
Man: Other than your dad, what forms your humor?
SK: The crushing reality of death. (You guys got so dark when I said that!) Bo Burnham had a special a little while ago called Make Happy that I really enjoyed. It's very odd, very funny, really dry. When I was younger I watched Jon Stewart specials, and I watched a lot of Chris Rock, and I watched Louis C.K. Those are probably the things that have informed me.
Woman: Not to put pressure on you, but are you going to write another book?
SK: I'm supposed to, because that's what you're supposed to do . . . I guess. I don't know if I've got another first-person essay collection in me right now. That's probably a good thing. Maybe I'll write some erotica. I think the world needs some sarcastic erotica.
From the B&N Reads Blog
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