One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
Essays
Ratings11
Average rating3.8
"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"--
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y'all know I love a collection of personal essays! (or maybe you don't know that about me, but whatever, I just TOLD you.)
This feels like half of a memoir? Many of her essays connect to each other and loosely tell the story of the author's upbringing as a 2nd-generation Indian-Canadian, while others are more recent and talk about ~internet culture~ etc. It wasn't exactly cohesive enough to be a straight-up memoir, but it was a little bit more than what I usually think of as an ~essay collection~? IDK, who cares what exactly it is, I enjoyed her insights and humor.
Life, death, family, marriage, sex, rape/surviellance culture. It feels like I'm reading more canadians-of-south-east-asian-heritage recently. Koul covers some interesting topics in as a brown woman westerner with complicated familiar relationships and ties to India but one of her early phrases really hit me in the feels:
“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.”
