There are many essayists, but no group with a style as recognisable as that of BuzzFeed essayists. The New Journalism practitioners were discernible too, but only because they make the journalistic novelistic. Even then, where Tom Wolfe is flamboyant, Joan Didion is stone cold, precise like a surgeon. They followed no cult of regularised style. They were not siblings at the same dinner table. They were not canvassers on the Internet.
A child of the internet
“I picked a career that’s preternaturally suited to getting into arguments on the internet,” writes Scaachi Koul in her latest offering, Sucker Punch, a collection of essays about, of all things, fighting. Not pugilism in the ring as much as the banal sparring with yourself, your parents, your partner, your friends, and your fans. Koul owes her present reputation to her stint as a culture writer at Buzzfeed Canada, where she wrote essays with titles like “I Went To A Summer Camp For Adults And It Was Weird”, “There’s No Recipe For Growing Up”, and “Can TV Make Us Not Hate Ourselves?” It’s a background that places them squarely within a certain type of online writing, that of the BuzzFeed essayist.
The standard BuzzFeed essayist is a child of the internet. They have known no other home. Only their devices, a reliable data plan, and a penchant for living a narratable life keep them company. To them, the journalistic is the memoiristic. In BuzzFeed, it hardly matters where you come from. Just one caveat. You can never shed the skin of the BuzzFeed essayist. With a beast of an internet to feed, what else will the BuzzFeed essayist write about if not themselves?
While recognisability as an essayist is desirable, being recognisable as a specific type of essayist is perhaps not. An essayist is only as good as their personality. When in history have good writers ever wanted to sound like regular ones? Ever since the internet, apparently. “I know how to write these stories because they’re all the same,” writes Koul about writing profiles that follow women falling from the grace of their television producers, “…but the readership rarely tires of them and neither do I.” The readership rarely seems to tire of the internet essay, either.
Although not to be confused with the personal essay, the internet essay owes much to its compatriot. It shares its vanity, vapidity, virility, verity, and variety, not to mention vitriol. Even fiction has been the target of rants against the personal essay, as this piece points out. Where the personal essay seeks to enlighten, the internet essay entertains. “The internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things,” writes essayist Jia Tolentino in her 2017 New Yorker article, “The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over”. Tolentino narrates the noiseless abandonment of personal essays in favour of good old reporting; one of the missteps of our time was to confuse the two.
What is the internet essay, though? Like the personal essay, it is where the writer fidgets with the question of whether they have something to say. Except, the writer (as well as the editor) shelves the question immediately. It’s too demanding. Content begs quick production (cumbersome questions get in the way like a pestering co-worker). Where the internet essay breaks away from the personal essay is when it becomes conversational, digressive, and sometimes fragmented. It is a work-in-progress impersonating a completed draft, strewn with hackneyed cultural criticism and memes, often structured for skimming. Mobile-optimised. I could’ve read Sucker Punch on my phone, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.
As a Brown writer in America, Koul can’t not talk about race, but she goes the extra mile and whisks in religion. Even her index follows the pattern of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in Hinduism. She writes, “It was boring to talk about God,” before slinging out an extended metaphor comparing herself to Parvati: “Parvati wanted to marry Shiva; her parents, however, didn't approve.” Koul married an older white man, which seems inevitable, considering how even the deities have “white skin”. “(Why were they always white?)” she asks in parentheses.
There are many other such considerations relegated to these brackets: “(I’m sure there’s a joke in here somewhere about the white man in my life getting his visa during a Trump administration in about five minutes while mine took more than a year, but I’m too tired from living through that administration in real time to mine for the punchline. Later, when Trump becomes our cyborg king, I’m sure I’ll be able to make sense of those heady early years).”
That titbit is from an essay titled “Lolita, Later,” which is perhaps the most vulnerable of the lot, which questions the trouble of embodying the character of Lolita the way Humbert Humbert intended, as a girl who has agency. In the essay, Koul struggles to reach a point, bringing together morsels from her age-gap marriage that ended in divorce, the experience of dating an emotionally unavailable man after the fact, and her reasonable distrust of men. The Trump joke has no room unless Koul wants to stick to narrating her deliberations at a cocktail party. Perhaps that’s what she desires. As millennials like her might say, she’s too “lit” to write a book, y’all.
A Brown woman in America
The tedious digressions are inescapable in the internet essay, a form that desires a clear political leaning. No ambiguity allowed. Depending on the country you’re from, there is a checklist of things you must have an opinion on to be worthy of writing on the Internet. In America, it’s trans issues, Trump, and vaccination. In India, it’s Modi, minorities and Hindutva. A self-diagnosis is also mandatory, obliged by an internet nibbling on the scraps of psychoanalytic theory:
Falling in love with someone older, protective, and angry was a response to him assaulting me. Running away from Toronto was another attempt to avoid reckoning with the kind of girl who would “let something like this happen” to herself. And, ironically, kick-starting some gupshup with Jeff during lockdown was my own way of avoiding the more urgent fight happening inside my marriage.
In this essay, squarely titled A Close Read, Koul examines her fraught relationship with a man named Jeff, who sexually assaulted her when they were at university. Before his passing, she had contacted him; their conversations were lukewarm, inviting no apology and only derision from her husband when he found out. Going by these pieces, nothing in Koul’s life appears to exist independently of everything else, and life imitates the structure of the book, where its claim to being a collection of essays seems propelled by a desire to stand out in an American market buffeted with divorce books.
Perhaps the difference, to labour my point as Koul often does, is that hers is a Brown woman’s perspective. If I had to think prototypically, internet essays by “a Brown woman in America” can produce prattling platitudes on identity, belonging, cultural duality, generational conflict, burdening expectations, and defiant joy – to name just a few – and Sucker Punch delivers. In the soliloquy on her relationship with her body, “Chocolate, Lime Juice, Ice Cream”, Koul chatters about her lifelong struggle with body image and self-esteem, the cradle of which she, as you might guess, owes to her mother (“I was at my thinnest at that wedding; I knew, because my mom told me I was. She was proud. I was hungry.”).
Somewhere along her essay, Koul writes: “It’s rote for a woman to blame her issues with food on her mother, but clichés exist for a reason.” After her divorce from an ex-husband who “was always feeding” her, Koul’s mother had a persistent question: “Did you eat?” (“Did you eat?” she’d say. “You have to eat. Eat everything. Eat whatever you want. Eat now.”) The essay paddles the same ideas that float in its sisters: Koul loved her husband, forgot for a whole hot minute that she was a complete person in her own right, left him, and is now discovering herself, recuperating all the while. Since she’s a writer, a book is a part of that process.
The internet essayist has to get to a point. She doesn’t have the privilege of mere deliberations, even if the process of self-discovery guarantees simply that. Here’s how Koul arrives at hers:
But I don’t need to hide from myself, or hide myself from other people. Besides, I cannot hide because no one will let me. Even if I try to slink away to an invisible place, someone will come and get me. It’s nice in the light if you can stand in it long enough to feel the warmth. Looking at my body with my own gaze is a light unto itself. I try to stay there as much as I possibly can. My mother told me to eat, and so I did.
On arriving here, Koul sounds like anyone else. I won’t deny that she’s a good writer, but in Sucker Punch, Koul becomes the quintessential internet essayist, best read to escape the sludge of perpetually streaming “content” but close enough to it that there are no withdrawal symptoms.
Sucker Punch, Scaachi Koul, Penguin Random House.
