‘I write novels of ideas, but the ideas have to be lived by characters': Author Sanjena Sathian

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When Sanjena Sathian 's 2021 début, Gold Diggers, blossomed in Atlanta bookshops, I was wary of its premise. South Asian American suburbia, the novel's epicentre, is hardly terra incognita in literatures of the global anglophone. I had some reservations going in: encountering talismanic extractions of India in the American cultural landscape; the concept of two 'homes' and the dilemma of being suspended in some double unbelonging; hackneyed ethnographies of Ivy League-obsessives and Californian techies; and vignettes of one-upmanship within an immigrant community. And then there was a magical 'conceit' – for want of a better word – the blurb teased: a concoction derived from gold jewellery, turned into a 'lemonade,' which made the narrator, Neil Narayan's desire to assume some Supreme Indian-American version of himself a potable dream. I was wary of this magic reinforcing tropes that distil the South Asian experience to the dregs of the canon's literary icons. But, by the end of the prologue of Sathian's début, her pithy, cheeky, immersive prose swallowed me into a story that was subversive both in terms of its content and its form.
Gold Diggers is a stellar tragicomedy that mocks the standards set within the Indian American community by that very liquid enforcement that, ironically, seeks to meet those exact standards. It asks, as a review in The Guardian notes, if there are 'more ways of being brown on offer' in Bush-era America.
If Gold Diggers is a caustic ridicule of archetypes in the Indian diaspora, with a current of melancholy running underneath the prose, Sathian's 2025 follow-up has a different affect to it. Goddess Complex, her sophomore novel, is an eerie doppelgänger thriller, saturate with mystique around identity hijacks. It straddles the northeast United States and western India. It imports some of Sathian's omniscience from her début, this time on reproductive politics, saviour complexes of North America-based anthropologists, tradwife and wellness cults, and the mythos of motherhood.
In Goddess Complex, Sanjana Satyananda, a homonym of Sathian herself, is a doctoral candidate who is trying to reconnect with her Mumbai-based Irish and (purportedly) Indian actor husband, Killian, from whom she is estranged, so that he can ink their divorce. Suddenly, her phone twinkles with calls and WhatsApp texts congratulating her on her pregnancy, when, in fact, she has just had an abortion. A woman next to Killian, resembling Sanjana, blooms on her Instagram feed, and the chase for Sanjana to meet her Other ensues.
Fresh off a press run for the American release of Goddess Complex, which kicked off in her native Atlanta this past spring, I correspond with Sathian via email for this interview. Both of us have moved from Atlanta and across the world this summer, I to Calcutta and she to Hong Kong, where Sathian will be teaching creative writing at Hong Kong University starting spring 2026, after recent stints at Mercer University and Emory University, which is where we first met.
What I found so wondrous about Gold Diggers is how many genres it stitches. There is Neil's comic anthropology of different experiences of Indians in America. There is that breathtaking, tragic turn smack in the middle of the novel. With lores like the Gold Rush along the American west coast, and the Bombayan, we see a bit of historic intervention from you. There's the 'lemonade' in all its magical realism. And, of course, so many parts of the story make it a heist novel. How much of this hybrid genre approach was deliberate?
The genre-bending in Gold Diggers was intentional, but also inevitable. I wanted to write a big 'we' novel, something that captured both my particular experience of Indian America and a wider experience of Indian America (which is not to frame it as the experience or any definite experience). To do this, I had to be formally voracious. I wanted to involve multiple time periods and characters. It was also important for the narrative to have a confident style. I love a lot of different genres, especially the social realism of writers like Zadie Smith, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen, whose approach to literary fiction is to write a 'we' story, as well as the magical realism of writers like Salman Rushdie, Aimee Bender, and Haruki Murakami, who turn to what I deem non-realism because reality itself is unrealistic (as Rushdie has said). I find life itself uncanny, especially the experience of straddling worlds and cultures, and magic helped me literalise that.
Which aspects of the story did you find most challenging to tackle? And which sections came more spontaneously?
The hardest parts of the story to write were the heisty bits – the stuff that's heavy on plot logistics and escalation. I learned a lot about how to write plot, and I think it's now one of my strengths. I studied writers like Donna Tartt and Eleanor Catton, who make heavily plotted novels feel effortless, not clunky.
How do you feel about the term 'magical realism' and the ethnic boxing it inspires, especially of writers with origins and stakes in the Global South?
To be honest, I think it's more constricting for Latin American writers. I don't find it a frustrating phrase as a South Asian American writer. I do write magical realism; that's a reasonable genre to classify Gold Diggers. The only annoyance I have is that some snobbish American MFA realist writers seem to forget that magic has always been a part of literary traditions. Magic begins with myth, and stretches to include traditions like the Gothic novel, and writers like Gogol and Kafka, who helped invent fiction as we know it today.
All the canonical writers of the magic realist genre, I consider them great surrealists of this literary tradition. Theirs is a manic cadence with often gigantic scopes across space and time. But the 'alchemy' in Gold Diggers feels very economical – a light touch – sort of like the early work of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who blurbs your début. What was your deliberation process like when you were deciding on the scale and intensity of the 'magic' in Gold Diggers?
Magical realism is so vast. There are writers like Ursula K LeGuin who work in fabulist traditions and invent other worlds. There are writers like Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Namwali Serpell, and Toni Morrison who inhabit known geographies and overlay them with magic. There are writers like Angela Carter and Helen Oyeyemi who retell folk tales and fairy tales. There are writers like Aimee Bender, Ruth Ozeki, Banana Yoshimoto, Han Kang, and Shirley Jackson whose magic often has a very light touch. There are writers like Raymond Carver and Laura van den Berg who write a realism that is infused with the strange. Then there's Haruki Murakami and Colson Whitehead, who do it all. I learned from all of these writers.
Gold Diggers is probably closest to a hybrid of the Bender/Ozeki and Murakami/Whitehead school: I wanted to write a novel that was firmly grounded in the real but in which reality bends because it must, because the edges of reality cannot hold. I wanted to write a novel that was equally satisfying as a work of realism and as a work of nonrealism.
There is a key moral and ethical dilemma that I was not able to quite resolve after finishing Gold Diggers. This has to do with our collective relationship with capital. The characters in the novel who steal the gold don't do it to convert it into cash. They drink it. Here, it feels like these characters are subverting our general equation with materialism. But then the value that is extracted from this gold – as almost career enhancers – feels directly tied to capital: that pageant you need to win to be closer to a scholarship or that test you need to ace to not end in one of America's state schools, and squash your Silicon Valley goals. Would you comment on this interesting double bind gold has, and how you approached this twisted spectre of capitalism in the novel?
This is such a thoughtful question from a critical and scholarly perspective. But it's not exactly how I think about symbol and meaning in my work. If I did, I might get confused and caught up in ideas. I write novels of ideas, but the ideas have to be lived by characters, if that makes sense. And because people are flawed vessels for ideas, my novels cannot fully or completely resolve or issue flat arguments. They can only turn over ideas, over and over again, try to make them more alive, and then leave the rest to the reader.
My characters in Gold Diggers can be understood as greedy, in a fundamentally American sense à la that crucial American novel, The Great Gatsby, which appears a lot in the novel. They don't have to convert the gold into cash because they're 'model minorities' who already have a degree of security in America. What they want is status, security, and power in this new country. So in that sense, their ambition is naked capitalistic greed. But also, I am empathetic to the desire under that desire: they have equated the security of being a 'model minority' with a more base human need: to feel at home, to belong. I try to turn over the idea of belonging, to see how, yes, it can be twisted if we unthinkingly equate belonging with status-striving, as many dominant caste, wealthy Hindu Americans do. But belonging can also be the thing that brings us together, romantically, and in community. In The Great Gatsby, a man remakes himself for both love and money. Can we extricate the two? I don't think so. Can we see the simultaneous beauty and tragedy of the way love and money are intertwined in America? I think that's the point of the book.
Congratulations on the publication of Goddess Complex. I found it a significant departure from your début. The scope of your anthropological lens, which is quite ambitious in Gold Diggers, is adjusted for a more streamlined set of characters and stakes. It closes in on a very specific cross-section of the millennial experience and dilemmas today: the choices around motherhood, the paradoxes of influencer cultures, the performance of domesticity. These feel, despite global variances, transcultural still. I'd love to get your perspective on this movement (and I am offering a very crude reduction of your novels here) – from a critique of South Asian standards of merit and a 'good life' in Gold Diggers, to the complex philosophies of our generation around procreation.
Gold Diggers was a 'we' novel, and Goddess Complex is an 'I' novel, in an almost comical way. They're both told from first-person POVs, but Gold Diggers roves. It hops into other POVs. It makes an occasional use of first - person omniscience (kind of Gogolian, or like the works of William Styron or Robert Penn Warren). Goddess Complex, on the other hand, is about being trapped in one self. I also say it's comically an 'I' novel because I've named two characters after myself – ridiculous; funny, I hope – one is Sanjana and the other is Sanjena.
I don't know about transcultural. But, the novel is about something narrower than Gold Diggers; it's about procreation, as you say. But it's also not really that much of a departure in my mind, because both novels are about sociocultural imagination. They're about how difficult it is for people – perhaps especially second-generation Americans, perhaps especially millennials – to picture an alternative to the current ways of living and being. My characters are on the edge of normie-ness, in a sense; both my protagonists bristle against conformity. Neil, in Gold Diggers, resists the achievement culture of ambitious Indian Americans. Sanjana, in Goddess Complex, resists heteronormative family formation. Both of the norms that my characters are resisting come, I think, from the same place: a tragically diminished imagination; a failure to believe in other ways of being, some alternate futurities.
You offer such astute observations on some ethnic alliances yet the diasporic differences of Sanjana and Nakusha, the interlocutor for Sanjana's dissertation, who lives in Mumbai's Dharavi. I was so moved when I read Sanjana's words on, essentially, her trade: 'You are never yourself, converted, never a part of the world that you purport to understand. It was a terrible way to live. It was like not having a body at all, like being a concept instead of flesh.' Would you talk about some of your own life experiences – I am thinking of your role as a journalist – that informed and inflected this affect?
Sanjana is an anthropologist, and a core part of her psychic drama in the novel is that her job is to study beliefs of all kinds. And yet, she isn't really a believer of anything in particular. Nakusha was Sanjana's 'subject'; she's a shamanic figure who experiences spirit possession as a way of healing women. Sanjana watches these possessions take place, and yet is not herself possessed. This failure to believe is what leads Sanjana to flirt with some wild ideologies later in the novel; it's what makes her vulnerable to certain stories we tell about why women must be mothers.
I do get some of this from journalism. I think the condition of being a reporter is similar to the condition of existing in secular humanism. I always felt outside what I was reporting on. When I was reporting in India, it was important for me to acknowledge my outsider status for ethical reasons, as I am a subjective set of eyes witnessing India. I was limited by my Americanness, by my mediocre language skills. I was also fascinated by the fact that I could not imagine believing some of the things my subjects believed. I wrote about Silicon Valley bros who want to live forever; about radicals on both ends of the political spectrum.
It has been thrilling to encounter some of your early writing during your press run for this novel. I was reading your short story, ' Catfishing in America,' which was published when you were working towards your MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I've also been reading your nonfiction pieces, some published around the release of Goddess Complex, and some that predate it. Your Time magazine piece, for instance, on Usha Vance and a kind of namesake unkinship you feel there with the recent US election result; your appraisal of autofiction trends; your scholarly survey of 'choice plot' novels. Each of these pieces foreshadows or retroactively annotates your novel in some capacity. I was wondering if you might talk to us about the writing of these different pieces and how they might have served as skeletons for the novel, or as postscripts to it, or both. How would you like the reader to approach your paratextual mosaic here: as companion pieces to or separate from your novel?
Thanks for reading so much! I am touched. I honestly don't expect anyone to read all of my work. People encounter what they encounter. There are trends across the modes I write in because, like any writer, I am working through similar or connected sets of ideas, over and over again. One thing I'll say is that I think I get bored with working through these ideas in the same format. All writers have a limited number of things to say, but we have the chance to experiment across genres and styles, both within literary fiction and across prose styles. I would say that my voice is relatively consistent. Hopefully, I'm consistently funny. I'm often a little snarky. But my genre-play is a new game every time. I've mentioned a bunch of writers I love – Smith, Roth, Whitehead; I'll add Dan Chaon and Michael Chabon to that list now – and one thing those writers have in common is that they try new things with every book. Not every book works. Roth's The Breast is unforgivable. But the risk of each one is a thrill to follow. I hope that my own reinventions, even as I play with related ideas, make it fun for readers who do read more than one of my pieces or books to keep reading me.
There is a phrase in the second half of your novel which I think best encompasses the germ of the plot in Goddess Complex: 'an anagram of real and unreal things.' It might be reductive to call your novel a doppelgänger plot. It strikes me more as the characters being split into the real and aspirational parts of themselves. They are constantly moving in and out of these fragments, especially Sanjana and her mysterious 'Other.' Without spoiling much (I hope!), and perhaps teasing the readers a little here, there is a character who is your namesake, last name and all, who is trying to move into the identity of Sanjana Satyananda, and there's this Irish/Indian actor, Kalyan Babar, who is, at the same time, trying to move out of the identity of 'Killian Bane,' Sanjana's ghostly husband. Can you talk a little bit about our desires, and sometimes, our obligations to shuffle in and out of identities of our real and staged selves?
I don't think it's reductive to call the book a doppelgänger plot! I modelled it off of two stories of doubles: Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock. But, yes, my work is always interested in anagrams of the real and unreal. I think I find realism and nonrealism such suitable genres to play with because life itself is a mix of the real and the unreal. We walk around in material reality, live our lives in the real, and yet all of us are laced with, as you say, aspirations around identity and the Self. It's sort of a Buddhist idea that stuck with me from my years of being relatively immersed in Buddhist readings and practice; none of us really experience reality because we all have so many stories, so many falsehoods, obscuring our ability to see clearly. Enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition is nothing more than awakening to see reality clearly.
This reminds me of a bizarre interaction with a white woman at a reading I did in upstate New York for Gold Diggers. She raised her hand and asked if I thought I would always write about identity. She spoke sort of aggressively in a manner that made clear that she was talking about identity politics, and she did not think much of identity politics. I will make a jump and say she might read The Free Press and like Bari Weiss, though who can say. I replied that I thought all writers were always writing about identity, and she said, 'Well, I don't, and the fact that you think that tells me all I need to know.' I was really startled and we moved on, but I wish I'd asked, in the moment, for her to name a writer who wasn't writing about identity. All of us are writing about the self, about what it's like to be a person, or a consciousness. I cannot name a writer who isn't, in some way, interested in the self.
The 'choice' that is nuclear to the trajectory of events in Sanjana's life is currently a highly charged discourse around reproductive rights in America. I have felt a lot of queer kinship with feminist readings of abortion, and have been suspicious of queer movements that find you regressive if you don't aspire to normative structures like marriage and adoptive/reproductive ideals of family. Which is why I was so validated when I read that Sanjana, when asked to 'find her people,' entertained the idea of being 'taken in' by the LGBT student groups at college. Would you comment on the gravitas that 'choice' has today in familial and political landscapes of an American life, and any queer-feminist alliances you might have wanted to spark conversations about with your choice plot?
Sanjana never explicitly calls herself queer, but she has queer desires and queer experiences, and I think it's pretty clear that she's bi (as I am) or pan, basically not straight. But aside from the granularities of whom she wants to sleep with – it's by now a platitude to say this, but I'll say it – everyone is trapped by heteronormativity! Heteronormativity is not good for any of us, queer or straight, because it's a script for how to be a person, and most people's true selves do not align with scripts.
Reproduction and non-reproduction are great examples of ways in which heteronormativity constrains us all. If the heteronormative script of family formation is 'cis straight man + cis straight woman = 2.5 biological offspring,' as it is in America, well, we know how many people fall short of that. Queer people who want to reproduce are not that. Queer and straight people who don't want to reproduce are not that. Straight people who want to reproduce but face infertility are not that. Anyone who chooses to adopt is not that. The difference is that queer people have always known that we are not the norm, and so queer people have had to invent alternate futurities and reimagine life for themselves, whereas straight people don't 'have' to. So if there's some kind of alliance to be made here, it's: we're all screwed by norms, toss 'em? Again, I think that's sort of basic at this point.
Even though Goddess Complex differs so starkly from your début – it is incredibly eerie, something akin to a Hitchcockian short – it never veers into straight up horror like Jordan Peele or Coralie Fargeat films on our unruly doubles. You seemed very intentional about not staging some kind of gory showdown and you've left the denouement quite deliciously ambivalent, so delicious that when Sanjana is called about a documentary on her Other, her responses seemed to me like a perfect stand-in for why you went the route you ultimate tread in the end. It's a cunningly crafted moment in the novel, where you seem to be communing with the reader through Sanjana's dialogue with the journalist, offering here some clarity on your own approach to that relationship. Did that scene come spontaneously or was it something that had a philosophy behind it?
Thanks for seeing this so clearly. Yes, Hitchcock is the right comparison here, especially Vertigo, which is a double story, and which also uses mystery and unreality and then reveals that we've been in the real the whole time. I started the novel thinking that I was writing realism, honestly. It began almost as autofiction, and then I got bored and the book was bad. It only became interesting when I introduced the possibility of the unreal, in part because that made it fun. As far as the philosophy behind that scene with the journalist, there's an anthropologist named Tanya Luhrmann. Her book, When God Talks Back, is about people who 'talk to Jesus' in their heads. An idea I took from her is that if you believe something 'unreal' happened to you, well, then it did happen to you, because you are altered by the belief, if not the actual event. If you believe in aliens, your belief in aliens changes you as much as the alien encounter itself might have. (Incidentally, I wrote a story about alien belief – ' The Missing Limousine,' about a woman who believes that a bunch of contestants on The Bachelor have been abducted by aliens.)
There are these intertextual relationships you cultivate between your novel and Kafka's Metamorphosis and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, among others. Just enough to tease the reader, could you gesture towards what kind of conversations you are having with these classics? Besides these, what are some other extant works (any form or genre) you would say Goddess Complex might extend that conversation to post-publication?
I use Woolf because it's one of the great texts about fertility and the imagination. I got to that reading of it through the poet Belle Boggs's memoir of fertility, The Art of Waiting. Woolf was written by Edward Albee, a gay man, and it's about a straight couple who play this tragicomic game with each other, where they sometimes pretend that they had a child who died, but actually, there was never any child at all. What's really happening is that they are inventing a reality they have never lived. It's been called an allegory for a gay relationship in that era. It's also a universal story about what happens when our imaginations don't line up with our realities. As for Kafka, there's nothing better than The Metamorphosis for a text about change. Well, maybe the Julio Cortázar story 'Axolotl,' which I have a very subtle reference to early in the first half.
I've mentioned the two other key texts that mattered to me in writing Goddess Complex: Rebecca, Operation Shylock. I'll add Dostoevsky's The Double and Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, as well as the film adaptation of the latter. I also learned a ton from the novels of James Lasdun, especially The Horned Man, which is an amazing, funny, twisty, Kafkaesque novel about masculinity and unreliability. It's like the great MeToo novel, though it was written before MeToo. And if you liked my book, you might also like Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding, Emi Yagi's Diary of a Void, Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind, and Lexi Freiman's The Book of Ayn.