Scaachi Koul was 12 years old when she visited Vancouver for the first time. It was a particularly warm summer, with temperatures consistently hovering at the 35-degree mark, and much of her time was spent outside. She hated it. “The problem is that I don’t like anything,” she explains to the Straight by phone from BuzzFeed’s offices in New York City. “Like, if I at least liked one thing, I’d probably be fine. But I just don’t.”

She’s not exaggerating. In the first paragraph of the first chapter of her first collection of essays, One Day We’ll Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, the Toronto-based author declares that she’s no fan of flying. (“Planes are inherently unnatural,” she posits.) In Chapter 2, she details her detestation of the stereotypically female-oriented pastime of shopping. (Though, given the fact that she was once left butt-ass naked before two sales associates following an unfortunate fitting-room malfunction involving a pair of scissors, a tattered skirt, and a cleanly snipped thong, who can blame her?)

The third chapter sees Koul, who is a culture writer at BuzzFeed Canada, skewering the overt insults and microaggressions she’s dealt with all her life as an Indian-Canadian woman growing up in southwest, mostly white Calgary. In Chapter 4, Koul doesn’t outright say that she loathes Indian weddings, but she does assert that the ceremonies, and the traditional multiday obligations leading up to them, are “the furthest from ‘fun’ ”. I suspect you’re beginning to see a trend here. However, if you’re familiar with Koul’s work, you’ll know that One Day We’ll Be Dead is far from a laundry list of dislikes.

“It’s information that you probably wouldn’t volunteer to a stranger if it’s the first time you were meeting,” Koul, whose first name is pronounced “Sahh-chi”, says of the stories she shares, “but I don’t have a problem with talking about any of these things that make me uneasy.”

Such things include gender politics, rape culture, and the acknowledgement that the same fair skin that affords her a sort of perceived privilege in her parents’ homeland marks her as “brown” to her lighter-skinned North American peers. She also discusses topics such as her unrelenting body hair, deteriorating friendships, and that time she temporarily deactivated her Twitter account after being harassed for publishing a tweet in which she requested BuzzFeed Canada submissions from people who were preferably “not white and not male”.

In other words, Koul was attacked for exercising affirmative action. In 2016. Though, for the record, she did ultimately receive “a ton” of brilliant pitches from a number of aspiring women and nonwhite writers. “I don’t know what to say about it. It’s very strange,” she says of the incident, which made national headlines at the time. “And it’s weird that, sometimes, if I’m doing an interview and sources look up my name and they find this thing, I have to explain to them that I’m not, like, encouraging white genocide. These are conversations I actually have to have now because of this thing that altered my career. But it’s fine.”

Like the aforementioned subjects, Koul handles the event with hilarity, wit, and bite, though it’s layered with a depressing dose of reality that confirms that, yes, the Internet—and, hell, the world as a whole—can be a terrible, terrible place for women, especially those of colour and/or those who identify as LGBT.

This funny-but-sad quality—words that Koul’s own mother used to describe the stories—is what binds One Day We’ll Be Dead together. Well, that and Koul’s strained relationship with her father, whose steady disapproval of his only daughter’s life decisions leaves the book’s final essay on a note not unlike that of the nine that came before it: with the ribbon untied, its two ends hanging limply against an otherwise neatly wrapped gift box, begging to be secured into a tidy bow. “What happened to Jeff, the ‘Good Egg’?” one might ponder. “Was Koul and her father’s relationship repaired? Did Raisin ever come to the realization that she is, indeed, half Indian?”

“I think, with a lot of essay writing and maybe with nonfiction in particular, there’s a real desire to have an end to a story. Like, a clean, beautiful end,” Koul muses. “And I don’t think that’s going to happen a lot in life and I think I had to make my peace with that while I was working on the book.”

At the very least, Vancouverites will have the chance to ask Koul such questions in person, when the outspoken author rolls into town for the second stop of a cross-Canada book tour. There, she’ll discuss One Day We’ll Be Dead before getting to work as a writer and executive producer on a recently announced comedy series that will adapt her bestselling essay collection for the small screen. Before that, however, you’ll likely catch Koul out late, roaming the streets of Vancouver in an attempt to make up for her first miserable time here.

“I will say, I hear they call Vancouver 'No Fun City' because everyone goes to bed at 7 o’clock so that they can go hiking,” she mentions. “I’m not doing that. I am not doing that. I am so defiant about this.”

Scaachi Koul presents One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter at the Vancouver Public Library’s Central Branch on Tuesday (September 26). See event listing for details.