Goddess Complex - by Sanjena Sathian (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Library Journal - Jezebel's May Book Club Pick

"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.

Review Quotes

"A pithy writer who leans into her protagonist's flaws but doesn't excuse them . . . Sathian's treatment of discomfort with the idea of motherhood feels different and new, because her protagonist does not spend the whole book batting the idea around in her head . . . refreshing . . . a shockingly fun read for what is basically a story about a woman having an existential crisis." --Nora Biette-Timmons, Jezebel

"Biting . . . a twisted examination of motherhood and the arbitrary expectations of adulthood." --The New Yorker

"Very funny at times . . . prompts reflection about varying paths toward (or away from) motherhood, about different versions of the self, and about the choices we all make as we mature. Goddess Complex is a memorable trip." --Norah Piehl, Book Reporter

"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

"Wildly new, surreal . . . I live for this shit." --Maris Kreizman, The Maris 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

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.