PW named Sanjena Sathian a writer to watch in 2021 for her debut novel, Gold Diggers, about an IQ-boosting magic gold and the model minority myth. Her sophomore effort, Goddess Complex (Penguin Press, Mar.), is a “dazzling Operation Shylock–esque hall of mirrors,” according to PW’s starred review. It’s about a woman named Sanjana Satyananda who discovers she has a double, an Indian fertility influencer named Sanjena Sathian.
What drew you to the trope of the mysterious double?
In giving Sanjana two selves, I could dramatize her full self. I think that's why the double is such a rich conceit. It's a way of dramatizing what’s latent in all of us. I also just love the register of the Freudian uncanny. As Freud said, the scariest thing is the self.
While uncanny, this novel is less fantastical than your first novel.
I always start projects thinking there's not going to be anything strange or unreal, and then I end up following the advice of Salman Rushdie, who wrote in an essay that if reality itself is unrealistic, you can't restrict yourself to the tools of classic literary realism.
Do you see Goddess Complex as a delayed coming-of-age novel of sorts for Sanjana, a sarcastic, unmoored 32-year-old?
I just published a short story about a pair of empty nesters who decide to do magic mushrooms. For me, that's also a coming-of-age story. We’re always encountering some friction in whatever our life stage asks of us, and that is inherently dramatic and funny to me.
Speaking of married couples, Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a key reference text in the novel.
What's so amazing about that play is the way it works on two levels, as a piece of beautifully vicious theater and a heartbreaking story about what happens when the thing you planned to build your life around doesn't manifest and you have to create something new. That's what most of my work is interested in: how we are all given certain narratives—around starting families or model minorities—and what we do with those narratives when they start to stifle us.
One of those narratives concerns motherhood, which the narrator is deeply ambivalent about.
All through my 20s, some part of me thought I never wanted to think about motherhood in my work and that no one would ever ask a male artist to think about fatherhood in the same way. But for social reasons, I couldn't turn that part off, so I decided to write straight into it. I became obsessed with whether what I do with my body has any bearing on society. And I began spending a lot of time in weird pronatalist corners of the internet, well before the rise of J.D. Vance.
