Goddess Complex: A Novel

by Sanjena Sathian

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Sanjena Sathian dissects modern motherhood and millennial malaise in this taut tale following a woman’s encounter with her doppelgänger.

Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2025 by TIME and The Millions

“Inventive . . . astute . . . sharp and unexpected . . . Haunting and hilarious, Goddess Complex is at once a satire, a Gothic tale, a novel of ideas, a character study. Like any individual life, the book bristles with possibilities.” —R.O. Kwon, The New York Times Book Review

From the author of Gold Diggers, a biting examination of millennial adulthood, the often fraught conversations around fertility and reproduction, and the painful quest to forge an identity

Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.

There’s just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she’s bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face with what her life might have been if she’d chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger, and more tempting than she imagined.

A darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting, Goddess Complex is a twist-filled psychological thriller and a feminist satire of our age of GirlBosses turned self-care influencers, optimization cults, internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and much more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593489772
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	28,663
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers, which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by The Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It won the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Boulevard, and more. She’s written nonfiction for The New York Times, New York magazine, The Drift, The Yale Review, and NewYorker.com, among other outlets. She’s an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at Emory University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In spring 2025, she will serve as the Ferrol A. Sams Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University.

Read an Excerpt

1

Expectations

It began innocuously enough, with a text message from an unknown number that arrived while I was soaping my armpits in the ladies' room of the New Haven train station.

So you and K are back in town

I presumed that the sender had seen me lugging a forlorn expression around campus recently, where I was, in fact, back after a long spell away. Possibly we had even brushed past each other on the train platform moments earlier. I glanced over my shoulder, quickly, as if some figure might materialize from one of the Pepto Bismol-pink toilet stalls. Then I stood, very still, for perhaps half a minute. All was silent. I became suddenly aware of the foolishness of my posture, the way I was leaning toward the mirror, lit by the sickly fluorescence, my true eyes fixed on my reflected eyes, like a cat tensing up at its likeness in a windowpane. I shook off the chill that had run down my neck at the sight of the initial, K.

There had been nasty, disjointed flashes like this all year, as acquaintances whose names I could not remember, whose faces I failed to place, crossed streets or cafés to say hello and, inevitably, ask about Killian. He was, after all, still legally my husband. I usually just said, "Oh, he's out of town," because I could not bring myself to explain the limbo of our situation. I had ghosted him last summer, and we had not spoken in nearly a year. I was something between a wife and an ex-wife, between who I had been and who I would be next.

I pocketed my phone and returned to the task at hand: dabbing my smelly underarms with a damp paper towel. I had stopped shaving (out of laziness rather than self-empowerment) and the more forested my pits grew, the more they seemed to become their own ecological zones. On top of that, I had lost my deodorant, and I could not bathe, as I could not go home: it was commencement weekend on campus, and in order to escape the celebratory crowds of smug families and promising graduates who would emphasize, by contrast, my own pomp-less circumstances, I'd Airbnb'd my place to some undergrad's parents and fled to my friend Lia's, in Brooklyn. My stay had begun pleasantly, until, after I'd poured the four-dollar wine I'd brought as my keep, Lia coyly pushed her glass aside and announced that she was expecting.

"Expecting what?" I asked, absently, thinking of a piece of mail, or another guest.

"Expecting expecting."

Her beam matched the sheen of her stainless-steel appliances. Lia and her husband Gor had recently bought a two-bedroom condo in a new-construction high rise in Dumbo. All the appliances seemed straight out of plastic wrap. I felt like a mannequin in a showroom. In college, Lia had passed one barefoot, braless summer volunteering on a dairy farm, sleeping on alpaca rugs, extolling Diva Cups. More recently, she and Gor, both attorneys at white-shoe law firms, had been featured in a New York magazine piece about millennials' home-buying "journeys." I was still unaccustomed to this new Lia, who had found serenity in her renunciation of renunciation.

My throat clogged, and instead of congratulating her on having become successfully inseminated, I said, "Who the fuck says expecting instead of pregnant?"

Her doll-like features immediately contorted into an expression of utmost sympathy. I grasped that she thought I was jealous.

It was true that my life was increasingly becoming the warped inverse of hers. I'd left Killian the month she and Gor celebrated their two-year wedding anniversary; signed a lease on a dank studio weeks before they closed on the condo. And there was something else, too: unbeknownst to Lia, I had terminated a pregnancy last August. The pregnancy had transformed what had once been my ambivalence about childbearing into a certainty. I could only think: I do not want it in me; I cannot be split.

For weeks after the procedure, I cramped and bled. The doctor said the bleeding went on too long; my womb, she deadpanned, had "relaxed too much."

So, no, I did not envy Lia's forthcoming rascal.

If I coveted anything about her life, it was the glow of comprehensibility that surrounded her. Once, I, too, had made sense, but of late, I was becoming less defined. I seemed to have abdicated my birthright citizenship to the nation of marriage and mortgage and motherhood, and beyond its borders lay uncharted terrain. I did mourn something after the procedure-not a specifically rendered unborn child, some slo-mo picture of a dark-haired creature soaring higher and higher on a bright red swing. (I had not contracted Killian's childhood Catholicism.) Rather, I grieved the loss of a version of me who was more fathomable to the world.

Had I told Lia about the abortion, she would no doubt have glanced, pro forma, at the pink i'm with her mug on her trinket shelf, assuring me (assuring herself) that she bore no judgment. But I feared that everyone I knew had suddenly inherited a capacity for love that I lacked, and I was certain they believed that I was missing out on the Fundamental Mystery of Humankind. So, I kept my choice to myself.

I tried again: "Wow!" I said. "Your baby will be so cute."

Lia bit her lip.

I asked whether she and Gor planned to hyphenate Wojciechowski-Grigoryan.

Her palm flattened against the gleaming black countertop like she was massacring a large bug. "I guess I never told you. I took his name."

She stood abruptly and went to dump her wine in the sink. With her back to me, she began to loop a lock of her blond hair around her index finger, turning the knuckle paper-white, cutting off circulation. She was nervous.

"No. Or, yes," I agreed. "You never told me."

"I knew what you would say." Her vast blue eyes narrowed warningly, puddles shrinking in the sun. "And before you say it, there are a lot of reasons people change their names." Lia enumerated them: being closer, forming a clear family unit. Anyway, what was feminist about being forced to choose between her shitty father's unpronounceable surname and her very nice husband's?

I pointed out that my name is Sanjana Satyananda and Killian's is Killian Bane, but I had not become Sanjana Bane in order to assimilate into an easier identity. Plus, I added, she was blond. She asked what that had to do with anything, and I said it meant she didn't get to complain about her ethnic last name.

Things escalated from there, and in the end, discovering that my dearest, oldest friend had remade her legal identity without informing me led me to snark something half-baked about the ethics of reproducing in the face of climate change. Lia burst into tears, which, while not unheard of in our eighteen years of friendship, made me seem especially cruel now that she was crying for two. Gor soon appeared in the doorway and suggested I leave.

I am an anthropologist, so I know: spinsters make good demons. We infiltrate the bodies and minds of the happily married, sowing discord. We steal babies, kill babies, eat babies. You have to banish us. Out in the field, I knew a female healer who specialized in exorcisms for infertile women. Her instrument of choice was the broomstick, with which she beat barren wives. The wives themselves sought this treatment. Often, they came to the healer knowing exactly what, or who, was to blame for their empty wombs, and they'd tell the healer: my sister, my neighbor, my enemy, she died unfulfilled (which could only mean sonless) and cursed me with this brutal bequest. Then the healer would lift her broom and get to work delivering the blessing of progeny.

Having finished armpit dabbing, I exited the bathroom into the vestibule of the train station. Its high vaulted ceiling, a miniature of Grand Central, reminded me of the ersatz quality of life around this campus. Like the imitation Oxbridge architecture, the station was a snow globe synecdoche of a vaster, more authentic reality. Filmmakers sometimes shot scenes here to pass off as Manhattan at rush hour-students, a blur of navy and black suits, playing the bankers and consultants commuting from suburbia whom they would, in time, become.

I sat on a bench to text Max the Harm Reducer, the twenty-four-year-old altruist with JV soccer good looks I'd been seeing. Perhaps he could lend shelter after my expulsion from Lia's. Just as I'd sent Max my SOS, though, a second message arrived from my unknown correspondent. Below the oddly hollow declaration-So you and K are back in town-it read:

I hear some big things are happening

I typed:

whos this

My thumb hovered over the send button.

Then, Max's name flashed up and my phone began to buzz.

He apologized in his sweet, nasal voice: he was busy tonight. He sounded like he was in a restaurant. Glasses clinked and voices swelled behind him.

"Are you on a date?" I asked. I meant it to come out flirty, but it sounded accusatory, clingy. I had no right to those feelings, as I was the one who'd insisted on our being nonexclusive so fervently that I'd cast myself as nearly ethically nonmonogamous, even a little turned on by the prospect of belonging to a harem. In actuality I desire neither; I was merely trying to move more weightlessly through the world. "Why would you call me if you're on a date?"

"I, uh. Thought it was an emergency."

I tried what my ex-therapist, Dharma Matheson, LMFT, MSW, had once suggested would root me to the present in times of agitation. I closed my eyes and did a Kegel.

I opened my eyes. A South Asian woman about my mother's age was scrutinizing me across the antechamber from behind the counter of a Dunkin' Donuts. I smiled. She did not smile back. When I encountered my own kind in the wild, it could go either way. Sometimes they mistook me for one of them. Nice Daughter, Sweet Sister. Other times I failed to pass, and they intuited the real me: a thirty-two-year-old soon-to-be divorcée currently on medical leave from her graduate studies, who had twice overdrawn her bank account in the past year to pay rent. When my mother was my age, she was in a successfully arranged marriage, with two children, an MD, and an expectation that the next generation would out-earn her. Dunkin' Auntie seemed to know all this, sorting me into the category of Bad Brown Girl, like she knew I was a married woman currently begging a man to take me in, and that I would have delivered an enthusiastic extramarital blow job in gratitude.

I assured Max that it was not an emergency.

I went outside, Auntie-ji's eyes boring into my back, and waited in the balmy May air for the campus shuttle to pull around. I weighed my options. In better times, I'd have crashed with someone from the anthropology department, but all my friends had either graduated without me-i.e., on time-or defected from the academy for noncontingent jobs with employer-backed health care. My campus ID wasn't working, due to the medical leave, so I couldn't slip into a library to pass out on a couch. I had one choice left. It was not ideal.

I settled into the largely empty bus and glanced back at the blue bubbles on my phone screen. The area code was 408-Northern California. That could be anyone in my world of coastal elites. My whos this lingered, unsent.

I glowered at that second note-I hear some big things are happening-and the stupid throbbing pink heart emoji. Pity, that's what that heart signified. My texter knew my marriage had failed. They did not want to offer me comfort; they wanted to gawk at my fuck-ups.

It's okay to keep others out for a while, Dharma had said. You're waiting.

(For what?)

To encounter your next incarnation, she'd said, as though it were obvious. You just haven't met her yet.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/11/2024

Sathian (Gold Diggers) wraps a whip-smart satire of Millennial womanhood around an arresting story of mistaken identity. Narrator Sanjana Satyananda leaves her husband, actor Killian Bane, behind at a commune in India, driven away by his pressure to have children. She returns to New Haven, Ct., where she confirms she’s pregnant and has an abortion. Afterward, however, she begins receiving mysterious text messages from strangers in India congratulating her on her pregnancy. Meanwhile, she struggles to restart her life, as she’s unable to contact Killian to initiate divorce proceedings. She also withers under the scrutiny of her married older sister, Maneesha, who monitors her on a home security camera while she house-sits for the Hindu couple, and chafes at her friend Lia’s joy at being pregnant. At Lia’s baby shower, a guest shows her an Instagram account belonging to a pregnant woman named Sanjena Sathian, who looks just like her, and she realizes the mystery messages are likely meant for Sanjena. The novel then morphs into a dazzling Operation Shylock–esque hall of mirrors, as the narrator heads back to India for the dual purpose of tracking down Killian and confronting her double, a search that eventually leads her to a Hindu fertility resort. Sathian’s social commentary is riotous (guests at Lia’s shower wear masks with Lia’s face emblazoned with the term “MommyBoss”) and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgänger theme (“I never knew you could accidentally become the wrong version of you”). This is incandescent. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Inventive . . . Goddess Complex is astute about the repetitiveness of misery, and how pain can accrete like an enclosing wall, rising to block out the rest of the world . . . [The book] takes a sharp, unexpected turn as Sanjana flies to India, where she intends to finalize her divorce but ends up at a remote resort run by her doppelgänger, Sanjena, instead. It is here that Sanjana’s focus on her alternate lives turns literal, the novel swerving into a more frenzied chronicle involving elaborate deceptions, a cultish pregnancy influencer and a lot of blood . . . Haunting and hilarious, Goddess Complex is at once a satire, a Gothic tale, a novel of ideas, a character study. Like any individual life, the book bristles with possibilities.” —R.O. Kwon, The New York Times Book Review

“Sathian (Gold Diggers) wraps a whip-smart satire of Millennial womanhood around an arresting story of mistaken identity . . . a dazzling Operation Shylock–esque hall of mirrors . . . Sathian’s social commentary is riotous . . . and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgänger theme . . . This is incandescent.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“With its piercing exploration of the unrelenting pressure on women to have children, Sathian's witty and wise novel will resonate with readers on either side of the debate and everyone in between.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Suspenseful to the very end . . . this well-crafted, mysterious novel with some dystopian twists is a worthwhile read. Fans of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will devour it.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Sathian unspools a wide-ranging, at times hallucinatory yarn that encompasses her protagonist’s frustrations with rigid rules about femininity, motherhood, Indian American social norms, and more . . . Not for nothing does the novel feature an epigraph from the Gothic classic Rebecca; the novel is rife with doppelgängers, gaslighting, hidden histories, and more, all to the purpose of questioning the behavioral expectations placed on women like Sanjana . . . It’s a noble goal, with fine set pieces that are both funny and melancholy.” —Kirkus

“Buckle up, readers: Goddess Complex, an heir to the best of Kafka or Roth in both its savage comic brilliance and its depth of meaning, is the wildest of rides. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that was simultaneously so serious in its ambition—this is a novel, ultimately, about female power and agency—and such a perfectly plotted page-turner. I could not put it down.” —Vauhini Vara, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged

“Goddess Complex is hilarious, astute, and thoroughly enjoyable.” —Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists

“Goddess Complex is the most interesting, illuminating, and bold contemporary novel of ideas I’ve read in years. Sanjena Sathian has given us a world that’s split—between India and America, between acid and ache, between the longing to reproduce and the longing to remain inviolate, between comedy and horror—in a way that affords us that rarest of opportunities: a space to truly think.” —Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of the National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different

“Sanjena Sathian has written a novel of great wit and daring, a phantasmagoric journey that dazzles at every turn. It’s surreal, it’s funny, it’s raw, and it glimmers, sentence upon sentence, with brilliance.” —Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North

“Sanjena Sathian’s Goddess Complex is brilliant, audacious, and funny as hell. In a voice reminiscent of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda July, Sathian writes about young adulthood with wit, heart, and aching precision. This isn’t a novel about a character stuck between two worlds, but a woman stuck between the world and herself. And that’s why I loved it.” —Neel Patel, author of Tell Me How to Be

“Goddess Complex has the rare quality of being both raucously funny and deeply affecting. Sanjena Sathian explores many topics in her second novel, from the surreal world of the pregnancy industrial complex to big questions of identity and self-creation. But it never loses sight of a simple, human concern: how to preserve our individuality in a world that seeks to degrade it. In one beautiful sentence after another, she shows us the absurd expectations of our modern moment, and the result is nothing less than spellbinding.” —Lee Cole, author of Groundskeeping

“Sanjena Sathian has written a whip-smart millennial mystery that charts a satirical course through the absurd cultural landscape of female identity. Funny, searching, and delectably rebellious.” —Lexi Freiman, author of The Book of Ayn

“Sanjena Sathian’s remarkable new novel is as clever as it is unsettling, at once horrifying and hilarious—Rosemary’s Baby, if Rosemary could freeze her eggs. An utterly contemporary psychological thriller about motherhood, identity, and doubles, Goddess Complex establishes Sathian as an indispensable writer of our generation.” —Andrew Ridker, author of Hope and The Altruists

From the Publisher

★ 02/01/2025

Sathian's second novel (after Gold Diggers) opens with Sanjana Satyananda in the middle of divorcing her husband Killian, whom she left behind in India after they disagreed over whether to have children. They haven't spoken in nearly a year. Sanjana's best friend and her husband are gleefully expectant parents, whereas Sanjana is feeling melancholy about her own life after terminating a pregnancy before leaving Killian. Then Sanjana starts receiving texts from unknown senders congratulating her on her pregnancy and sending photos they believe are of her with Killian in India. But the pictured woman is not Sanjana, so she goes on a quest to find out who her doppelganger is and to learn more about her, her relationship with Killian, and the pregnancy. Relationships, mental health, well-being, motherhood, jealousy, and contentment are explored as Sanjana returns to India, where she winds up at a fertility clinic known as the God Complex. Readers may deem some of the novel's subplots more successful than others, but all will agree that the overall story remains suspenseful to the very end. VERDICT This well-crafted, mysterious novel with some dystopian twists is a worthwhile read. Fans of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale will devour it.—Shirley Quan

Library Journal

2025-01-18
A fizzled marriage, baby anxiety, and a peculiar doppelgänger lead a woman on a strange journey.

Sanjana Satyananda, the narrator of Sathian’s second novel, is in disarray. She’s left her actor husband, Killian Bane, in Goa after confessing that she’d had an abortion. She’s dropped out of her graduate anthropology program at Yale. Her friends’ settling down grates on her, and she’s been booted from her sister’s Connecticut home after having been caught having sex there. And strange DMs are arriving: Why is she being congratulated by a stranger for being pregnant? From this setup, Sathian unspools a wide-ranging, at times hallucinatory yarn that encompasses her protagonist’s frustrations with rigid rules about femininity, motherhood, Indian American social norms, and more. Sanjana’s search for answers leads her back to India, where she attempts to track down Killian (now pursuing a Bollywood career) and his new partner, a lifestyle influencer named Sanjena Sathian (just like the author; note the ever-so-slight spelling difference from Sanjana). Not for nothing does the novel feature an epigraph from the Gothic classicRebecca; the novel is rife with doppelgängers, gaslighting, hidden histories, and more, all to the purpose of questioning the behavioral expectations placed on women like Sanjana. (“What made them want to change? What drew all these people to the other realm, the next stage of prescribed adulthood, while I was being left behind?”) It’s a noble goal, with fine set pieces that are both funny and melancholy, but its range is also a problem. The novel veers tonally from page-turning goofiness (mainly featuring a dog whose Instagram Sanjana is tasked with maintaining) to noirish melodrama, in a dense plot the latter pages strain to clarify. The depth of Sanjana’s crisis is clear, but the story’s ever-shifting status obscures her emotional state.

An overdetermined tale of status and sexism.

Kirkus Reviews