Goddess Complex
A Novel
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Library Journal • Jezebel’s May Book Club Pick
“Inventive . . . astute . . . sharp and unexpected . . . 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.” —R.O. Kwon, The New York Times Book Review
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sathian (Gold Diggers) wraps a whip-smart satire of Millennial womanhood around an arresting story of mistaken identity. Narrator Sanjana Satyananda leaves her husband, actor Killian Bane, behind at a commune in India, driven away by his pressure to have children. She returns to New Haven, Ct., where she confirms she's pregnant and has an abortion. Afterward, however, she begins receiving mysterious text messages from strangers in India congratulating her on her pregnancy. Meanwhile, she struggles to restart her life, as she's unable to contact Killian to initiate divorce proceedings. She also withers under the scrutiny of her married older sister, Maneesha, who monitors her on a home security camera while she house-sits for the Hindu couple, and chafes at her friend Lia's joy at being pregnant. At Lia's baby shower, a guest shows her an Instagram account belonging to a pregnant woman named Sanjena Sathian, who looks just like her, and she realizes the mystery messages are likely meant for Sanjena. The novel then morphs into a dazzling Operation Shylock–esque hall of mirrors, as the narrator heads back to India for the dual purpose of tracking down Killian and confronting her double, a search that eventually leads her to a Hindu fertility resort. Sathian's social commentary is riotous (guests at Lia's shower wear masks with Lia's face emblazoned with the term "MommyBoss") and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgänger theme ("I never knew you could accidentally become the wrong version of you"). This is incandescent.
