Goddess Complex A Novel

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 similarly 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—literally—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 both 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 so much more.

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 a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, Electric Literature, and Amazon. It was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and won the Townsend Prize for Fiction. She is cowriting the screen adaptation with Mindy Kaling’s production company, Kaling International. Her short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Boulevard, One Story, and more. Her nonfiction can be found in The New York Times, The Drift, The Yale Review, NewYorker.com, and Lit Hub, among other outlets. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught fiction at the University of Iowa, Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and Emory University.