Goddess Complex: Motherhood Choice Drives Sanjena Sathian's Biting Satire

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

Here's an excerpt from Sanjena Sathian's Goddess Complex

I visited Lia on the third Friday of every month. I squeezed her son Luc’s fat little thighs and kissed him on the cheeks, but I never offered to babysit. Instead, I made her leave the apartment; Gor could handle Luc solo for a few hours. One night I got us tickets to a show: a contemporary reinterpretation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the bickering couple was two gay men and their guests, lesbians, which struck me as not all that much of a reinterpretation, since Edward Albee had been gay. But I couldn’t resist. The play was still my favorite thing Killian had ever done. When I first saw it, I’d thought of it as vicious satire; more recently, I’d been considering it as a tragicomedy about the entrapments of aging, the way life forecloses everyone.

Before the show, we got Greek food in the theater district. Lia was a shadow of herself. Her labor had been traumatic—twenty hours, failed epidural, emergency Cesarean. She’d felt betrayed by her body. “All you have to do is push,” she said. “And I couldn’t do that.” Even now, the breastfeeding was impossibly painful. My subletter, the nipple poet, could have written half a chapbook just on Lia’s raw tits. To Gor’s chagrin, Lia was opting for formula. 

“Motherhood isn’t, like, noble,” she said. “It’s really undignified. And I’m so anxious, all the time. I see death everywhere. Ways Luc could die, or Gor could die, or I could die. Not that I’m making the best pitch for it, and I don’t mean to trigger you, but …” She hesitated. “Would you still freeze your eggs? After everything with her?” 

I’d thought about it endlessly, of course, after returning to the US. I still understood the appeal of not having to decide my whole future now, of lingering in bothness, not opening the lid to see whether those Schrödinger’s eggs were good or rotted, in case I one day wanted them. But I didn’t like the idea of living my life apocalyptically, prepping for every version of me. I didn’t want to feel like I was waiting—for G, for some other Sanjana to appear. Perhaps Sunny was right, and one day I would regret my choices. But I was starting to suspect that there was no way to avoid regret, that all you had to do was find a way to live with it. 

These were the moments when I took an odd comfort in the fact that Sunny had gone on as her and I had gone on as me. It was better when women did not mix ourselves up with each other, when we did not act as though our bodies belonged to each other. 

“That shit is expensive,” I said finally, settling on the insufficient but simple excuse. 

Lia and I talked for a while longer, and at some point, we landed on Maneesha. After I got back to town, she had called me to make amends. The impetus for reconciliation: Beef Jerky had run away from Ajay’s sister’s house. Maneesha cried on the phone. The dog’s disappearance was a reminder that people could vanish from your life at any moment, she said. I’d resisted pointing out that Beef Jerky wasn’t a person. She’d shared a few updates: in Greece, away from job stress and American forever chemicals, she’d gotten pregnant the old-fashioned way. She would be taking some more time off work. Xerox was an obsolete company, anyway, and she was starting to have some questions about the way the corporate workforce treated women. The advent of a new baby had clearly inspired Maneesha to tie up loose familial ends, so everything could be in order for her perfect home. Perhaps at Maneesha’s behest, my parents were also calling me once a month, and my mother had gone so far as to say that she looked forward to seeing me when she came to New Haven next—for Maneesha’s baby shower. 

I expected Lia to assert, in some essentializing way, that Maneesha was a mom who had to do right by her daughter, and I would never get what I’d put her through with the HomeSafe. 

“Your sister is such a bitch,” Lia said. “She should have gaslighted Naina.” 

“What?” I slopped tzatziki down my front and hurriedly took a napkin to it. 

“That’s what I’d do, like, ‘You didn’t see what you thought you saw!’ Or if she were older, I’d say adults sometimes kiss each other’s privates, but you wouldn’t talk about going potty in front of other people, so it’s best not to talk about this, either.” 

Another patron walked by, glaring at Lia. 

“I guess she could have done that,” I said. “Hey. I think you’re going to be a good parent. I’m sorry I never said that before.” 

“Why?” 

“I don’t know if I have the imaginative capacity to make a life for a whole other human being. It takes so much for me to picture my own life. Your imagination might be … bigger than mine. 

Extracted with permission from Sanjena Sathian's Goddess Complex; published by HarperCollins.