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5 days ago
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‘I write novels of ideas, but the ideas have to be lived by characters': Author Sanjena Sathian
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.
The Hindu
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
In conversation with Sanjena Sathian, author of Goddess Complex
What would you do if you found that there is an imposter out there living the life once prescribed to you? That there are questions about identity that need to be answered and choices that need to be made. You will probably feel lost (and perhaps even a little provoked), like Sanjana, the narrator in author Sanjena Sathian's latest novel, Goddess Complex (HarperCollins India). At once psychological thriller and feminist satire, the story delves into the personal and the political behind women's freedom and their right to choose. Edited excerpts from an interview with Sathian: Q: How much of your own life in the U.S. is reflected in your narrator Sanjana's dissonance — between being a 'bad brown girl' and feeling 'insufficiently' white? A: I will politely disagree with your characterisation of the novel. I don't think this book is about 'white versus brown identity'. Insofar as it is about a demographic identity category, it is about gender. That said, race is not something you can ignore in America, and so race comes up — often in comic ways that frustrate Sanjana. But I also have to say that neither the narrator nor I are torn between whiteness and brownness; we are both brown and neither of us has any desire to be white. I think it's important not to reduce Indian American storytelling. Q: The protagonist reaches a point in the story where she feels 'divorced from [her] body'. What was capturing that like? A: At the start of the novel, [Sanjana] tells us that she's recently had an abortion, and she then spends the first half of the novel being harangued by people who inexplicably think she's pregnant. I chose this somewhat darkly absurd situation to literalise what many women feel every day: even as we walk around thinking of ourselves as full humans, with desires and secrets and darkness, there are people out there looking at us as wombs with legs. That's uncanny. Q: The novel employs inner dialogue, retrospection and reflection as tools of storytelling; where the idea of the self constantly disperses and re-emerges. Did you choose this format or did it evolve with the story? A: I think you're talking about the novel's internal quality: we spend a lot of time in Sanjana's head. She's a first-person narrator, and an unreliable one. For much of the first half, we watch her decline and disintegrate in her own mind. Eventually, we see some of her inner messiness spill over into external messiness, i.e., the character's internal dramas become external plot points. I wrote it that way because that was how I got to know the character. I knew that she was going to be trapped in herself and that in order for the novel to have the alchemical effect on the reader, which novels can and should have, I would need [that to happen] at some point. Q: Between the Shout Your Abortion Movement and the recent shift in U.S. reproductive policy, where does 'Goddess Complex' fit in, in defining a woman's right to choose? A: Goddess Complex is a social novel; it's cognisant of social movements around reproductive rights, and the narrator is often reacting to those social movements and finds that some of the brave, social justice language of social media doesn't exactly work for her real life. [While] I do have characters talking about [these] social and political issues, the novel is set pre-Dobbs (the overruling of the fundamental right to abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022). Ultimately, it's a really personal story about one woman having a breakdown and going through some really weird stuff. It's not a book that can or should have to define a person's right to choose, because novels are not about defining rights. Novels are these radically hopeful objects that have to take for granted certain freedoms — freedom of thought, freedom of choice. Novels are too subtle, politically, to win rights for us. They can only give us insight into the private selfhood that political rights are there to preserve. Q: At what point do you feel womanhood becomes synonymous with motherhood? A: I don't think womanhood and motherhood are synonymous, but if you live in a society where the assumption is that all women are either potential mothers or people who should have been mothers but failed to be, then you lose the ability to understand womanhood outside of motherhood. Personally, I'm not even that interested in defining 'womanhood' at all. I'm interested in the self, and all the ways that our arbitrary social stories interfere with knowing our true selves. The interviewer is a freelance writer. Instagram @
Hindustan Times
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Sanjena Sathian: 'There's a very thin line between utopia and cults'
What was the driving force behind Goddess Complex? Author Sanjena Sathian (Courtesy the publisher) I started writing Goddess Complex in 2018, and it began as a project about the decline of a relationship between a 23-year-old woman named Sanjana (or Sanjena – I kept switching it up) and her husband, Killian. The doppelganger conceit was always present: the narrator was going to find herself obsessed with Killian's ex, another Sanjana (or Sanjena). But when I wrote further into that version of the project, I realised that the whole thing rode on sort of a cheap reveal, essentially, that Killian was a fool. After several years of work, I threw away the first 150 pages of that version of the novel – which I'd actually sold as a partial manuscript to my American publisher – and started over. The discourse around motherhood in both the Indian and the American contexts is heavily laden with social and religious conservatism which your novel delves into in a nuanced manner. Was this discourse and the way the reproductive medical industry functions what you wanted to explore through fiction? I never start a project thinking that I want to use fiction to explore a set of political ideals; if I did that, I think my books would not be very much fun to write or read. I usually start by thinking more about what's funny or strange or mysterious about the world, and in my life and my friends' lives. At the time that I was rewriting Goddess Complex, what was funny and strange and mysterious in my life and my friends' lives was the decision-making process around childbearing, the way some of us were choosing to parent and others were not. These are personal dramas that have undeniable political significance, but I start with the micro, petty stuff – e.g. for Sanjana, 'my best friend is having a baby and I feel neglected' (rather than 'I am mad about reproductive rights!) – and eventually end up saying something macro, the political. 252pp, ₹599; HarperCollins In Gold Diggers there was a strain of magical though the thematic concerns placed it well within the genre of a social realist text. In Goddess Complex you include a character with your own name though she is far from a literary self portrait. Is this use of the 'uncanny' something that you seek out while writing fiction, almost making it a play with what one considers to be 'real' vs the 'fantastical'? Very well-said; in a word, yes. Gold Diggers is an immigrant coming-of-age story that uses magical realism to say something about the familiar, even prosaic world of Indian Americans growing up in the US suburbs. Goddess Complex, by contrast, uses the uncanny to say something about the visceral (yet often creepy) experience of being a woman in her 'reproductive' years. In both cases, I've found it fun, and also natural, to blur real and unreal, in service of saying something true. In the novel, Sanjana notes how being an objective anthropological observer was akin to being 'a concept instead of flesh'. Did having an anthropologist as your protagonist add another layer to how you examine the role of the storyteller in your own writing? Yes, anthropology is sort of a stand-in for writing, but it was also a way for me to fictionalize and comment on some of my experiences as a journalist. Reporters perform a kind of ethnography. Ultimately, though, the real reason I was excited about writing an anthropologist was because I knew I wanted to write about a cult of some sort in the second half, and anthropologists make great literary tour guides into cultic organizations. They study belief, and many of them are curious about or fascinated by belief, but are not themselves believers. That's fascinating on a character-level to me. Much like in your book, there is an examination of the mother-daughter dynamic in contemporary literary fiction which then also delves into larger questions about identity, existential angst and worldmaking (Rosarita, The Illuminated, Girl in White Cotton to Tomb of Sand, Stone Yard Devotional). What drew you as an author to explore this dynamic? I'm a daughter who has chosen not to become a mother. I couldn't not be interested in that dynamic. I think the choices we make about whether or not to parent – which is ultimately the subject of Goddess Complex – are fascinating because they're about us, but they're also about our families, in the sense that our picture of parenthood is informed by our parents. There are attempts at a visualisation of several alternative modes of existence that draw in those who are searching for meaning in a late capitalist world. What was the inspiration behind constructing these (from Moksha to the Shakti Centre)? Alternative modes of existence is a nice way of putting it, because it shows sympathy for why people form those groups; I share that sympathy. Cults is another way of putting it. I'm an American-raised millennial, which means I belong to a generation that is extremely susceptible to cultic thinking. We were told that we were incredibly special, and that we need to find meaning in all aspects of our lives – do what you love! Then, we started looking for meaning in a recession-riddled landscape. Naturally, we start to look around and wonder – is there some other way of being? Some of those thought exercises result in really important productive social conversations – and some of them result in organisations that try to control your behaviour. There's always been a very thin line between utopia and cults. There are many literary allusions sprinkled throughout the text (from Jonathan Swift to Virginia Woolf and Edward Albee). Was this also another way in which you were tracing how fiction functions as a truth telling exercise, across historical eras, in society? Perhaps an exercise, though rooted in make believe, which might give shape to a more authentic portrayal of the world we inhabit than the digital double lives that most of us lead today? I don't think of my work as tracing the function of fiction, though that's a nice way of reading. I just read a lot, and my characters read a lot, so they're going to talk about their own lives through literature and art. I specifically chose Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? because it's such an important piece about fertility, family formation, and the imagination. Having written short fiction as well as full length novels, which form of literary expression are you organically drawn to and why? I'm most natively a novelist. Short fiction is great, and I've gotten better at it, but it doesn't come quite as naturally to me. I thrive in longer forms. What are you working on next? I'm superstitious and don't discuss it! Simar Bhasin is a literary critic and research scholar who lives in Delhi. Her essay 'A Qissa of Resistance: Desire and Dissent in Selma Dabbagh's Short Fiction' was awarded 'Highly Commended' by the Wasafiri Essay Prize 2024.
Deccan Herald
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Deccan Herald
Tackling questions of identity, choice
Author Sanjena Sathian captures the zeitgeist of our times in her novel, Goddess Complex, following her coming-of-age novel, Gold Diggers.
New York Times
07-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
After an Abortion and a Separation, a 30-Something Flails Toward Adulthood
If you're a woman in America and you don't want children — and if you're honest about this when people ask — then you might be excessively familiar with the common follow-up opinions, questions, warnings. You'll change your mind. What does your partner think? You're wrong. You'll regret it; once you come to your senses, it could be too late. Part of what can be striking about such rebuttals, over time, is how little they vary. It can feel as if the people claiming they know you better than you do are reciting lines from an immensely popular, age-old guide to life. Somehow, you've never read it: If you did, it probably still wouldn't be for you. But how did so many people get their hands on this guide — and, in its absence, how sure can you be that you're leading the right life for you? This question and its attendant bewilderment drive Sanjena Sathian's inventive second novel, 'Goddess Complex.' Thirty-two-year-old Sanjana Satyananda is in a state of profound confusion: After aborting the fetus she didn't want and leaving her baby-desiring husband back in India, she's staying at her sister's house in Connecticut while trying to figure out what to do next. Meanwhile, it seems that all of Sanjana's friends are turning into parents, joining a 'fellowship of mothers.' She feels left out, exiled: '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.' Sanjana might be less troubled by these phantom alternate selves — by all that she is not — if she felt more at home in how she has defined herself. Though she's nominally pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology at Yale, her research in Bombay has gone awry, and she's quit and then rejoined the program, doubting her faith in what used to be a vocation, a 'monastic higher calling.' '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. As Sanjana's desperation builds, so do the grievances of those she loves. She masturbates to online real estate listings ('I set a minimum total price of $750,000'), and disrupts a friend's baby shower by getting high and yelling the word 'abortion.' Her sister kicks her out after she has sex with a 24-year-old in the backyard, captured on the security camera for Sanjana's 7-year-old niece to see. (She even allowed the 24-year-old to urinate on her sister's tomato garden, having heard that urine helps tomatoes grow.) Sanjana envies her sister's 'comfortable' life, even as she is exhausted by the 'extreme machinations' it requires to keep up. Instead of fulfilling the house-sitting duties her sister has assigned, Before this perspective has a chance to feel stifling, 'Goddess Complex' 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. Startling behavioral twists become credible with the strength of characters' longing for parenthood. As Sanjana faces an important decision about her own reproductive fate, the narrative lifts her out of the limits of what she's imagined her life can be. 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.
