Having children is probably not in Sanjena Sathian’s future.
She’s among a growing number of U.S. women of childbearing age who are choosing not to procreate. But as the Atlanta author illustrates in her new novel, “Goddess Complex” (Penguin Random House, $29), arriving at that decision can be fraught with societal pressures and crippling self-doubt.
“I think the book became partly me investigating my own kind of conflicted feelings,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “I have always leaned against having children, but really did feel pressure, internal and external, to think about it in different ways and to kind of second guess myself.”
Now 33, Sathian said when she was in her 20s older women warned her that they didn’t want children at her age either, but they changed their minds when it was almost too late.
“Those people came at me with a lot of intensity that was more about them than it was about me,” said Sathian. “But you don’t know that when someone you love is telling you, ‘You will regret your decision. You cannot trust the person you are today because a version of you will arrive later and tell you that you’ve betrayed her.’”
“Goddess Complex” is a wild ride of a doppelgänger story that’s part light thriller, part social satire, and within its pages Sathian gets to explore the path not taken, sort of.
Main character Sanjana is in an emotional tailspin after everything that seemed to ground her has vanished. She’s a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology whose primary subject has abruptly died. She’s an estranged wife who left her actor husband in Bombay because he wanted kids and she didn’t, and now he’s ignoring her inquiries about finalizing their divorce. And she’s temporarily homeless, crashing with friends and family in New York while she figures things out.
Making matters worse, she starts receiving anonymous text messages congratulating her on a pregnancy she’d terminated a year earlier. On social media, she discovers her husband Killian has a new partner who looks a lot like her and even has a similar name ― Sanjena. Not only is she pregnant, she’s a social media influencer on the topic of babymaking.
Before long, Sanjana begins to run out of options. She wears out her welcome as a houseguest. Her desire to get divorced reaches epic proportions. And the mystery behind her doppelgänger is driving her crazy. The only thing left to do is return to Bombay and track down Killian and Sanjena. And that’s when things really get weird.
Adding to the narrative’s vertiginous qualities, the author ramps up the doppelgänger conceit by naming the antagonist after herself, which feels a bit like a head trip for the reader.
“It’s almost something a doppelgänger would do,” Sathian said when asked about it. “Doppelgänger novels and stories are about our fundamental primal fear that we have no self and that something else might replace ourself and replace our ego. This was a way of being like, yeah, I’ll take that. I’ll try to imagine what it would be like if another version of me stole me from myself.”
Sathian established herself as a wildly inventive storyteller with her 2021 debut novel “Gold Diggers,” a satire of the model minority myth set in Atlanta that involves the secret powers derived from drinking melted gold. The book won her the Townsend Prize and landed her on both the Washington Post’s and NPR’s lists of best books of the year. It’s currently in development with Mindy Kaling’s production company.
Currently a visiting professor at Mercer University, Sathian, who grew up in Dunwoody attending Galloway and Westminster schools, plans to move to Hong Kong with her partner in June.
When she began writing “Goddess Complex,” a lot of Sathian’s friends were starting to have children, and she initially felt isolated.
“I started out the book writing it from the perspective of I wanted to explain myself to myself,” she said. But something happened in the process. By putting herself into the shoes of her characters, she developed compassion for their choices.
“By the end of the book it did feel like kind of a lateral outreach from one experience of womanhood to another. … Over time I think the book becomes an attempt to understand all these different ways to be a woman.”
A Cappella Book’s Writers at the Wrecking Bar series presents Sathian in conversation with Tayari Jones at 7 p.m. March 11. For details go to acappellabooks.com.
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
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