Jezebel’s May Book Club Pick: ‘Goddess Complex’ by Sanjena Sathian

This was my headspace going into Sanjena Sathian’s Goddess Complex, and all of my skepticism was pretty immediately dispensed with. Sathian is a pithy writer who leans into her protagonist’s flaws but doesn’t excuse them; she instead uses them as an opportunity to reflect. (Her narrator, Sanjana, is, after all, a millennial who goes to therapy.) The novel opens with Sanjana learning that her best friend, Lia—who was once a fellow traveler but is now a lawyer at a fancy firm with a two-bedroom in downtown Brooklyn—is “expecting.” Sanjana has not told Lia that she had an abortion last year, nor that “the pregnancy had transformed what had once been my ambivalence about child-bearing into a certainty. I could only think: I do not want it in me. I cannot be split.”

Sathian’s treatment of discomfort with the idea of motherhood feels different and new, because Sanjana does not spend the whole book batting the idea around in her head. Instead, the novel starts with a clear delineation of what its narrator wants—not to be a mother. It is merely every other character who attempts to disabuse Sanjana of that conviction (in some cases, in flashbacks to times before she had firmly made the decision). Her own mother describes it as a duty. The head of the kibbutz-like compound where she lives for a few months calls Sanjana “spoiled” for being skeptical. Her sister, who is having trouble conceiving her second kid, begs Sanjana to freeze her eggs in case she changes her mind. Killian, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, repeatedly finishes in her after he decides he wants a baby; he does not ask what Sanjana wants. (For her part, she says, “I never said yes. I never said no.”) Only Lia, ultimately, doesn’t question Sanjana when she says “not wanting” motherhood is “its own kind of … hard”—but she also clearly doesn’t understand what this could possibly mean. Sure, there are paragraphs here and there where Sanjana thinks, for example, she “could understand the desire to fundamentally expand [oneself] with something that grew,” but they are immediately negated. There is no hemming and hawing; it is refreshing. 

Describing this dynamic; Sanjana’s own unsatisfying life (aimless while on medical leave from her anthropology PhD and trying to divorce Killian, who is unreachable while on a months-long silent retreat in India, where they once lived together); and the particulars of her young adulthood takes up roughly the first half of the novel. It’s a shockingly fun read for what is basically a story about a woman having an existential crisis. 

The second half pivots to focus on the plot that’s been building in the background this whole time: the mysterious texts Sanjana has been getting from unknown numbers, many with foreign country codes, congratulating her on her pregnancy. After at first assuming Killian has told people about her aborted pregnancy (to what end, she doesn’t know), she discovers an influencer in India who a) looks exactly like her, b) has a very similar name (which is also the author’s name, both cheekily and confusingly), and c) is pregnant with Killian’s baby. Sanjana has literally nothing else to do—and nowhere to live—so she flies to India to get her divorce, and to figure out what the fuck is going on.

She is welcomed by Sanjena (the influencer) at a resort-turned-fertility-clinic, where wealthy-ish women from across the world have come to get pregnant, freeze their eggs, or offer themselves as a surrogate. The vibes are distinctly off and somewhat culty, but Sathian doesn’t let the novel become a Rosemary’s Baby horror story (though Rosemary’s titular baby is referenced multiple times throughout). In fact, without giving anything away, what’s actually going on at Sanjena’s resort/clinic feels all too believable, because the flip side of ambivalence about motherhood is the desperate desire to get pregnant, and far too many women are forced to go to extreme lengths and spend tens of thousands of dollars to do so. 

I trusted Sathian to trust her protagonist in her desires and decisions. But even so, at the back of my mind, I worried that something could shift, and the novel would end with Sanjana coming out the other side of her disinterest, looking forward to motherhood (or at least freezing her eggs)—because that is ultimately what society writ large would want. Blessedly, Sathian does not seem to care about what society wants, and that’s all I’ll give away.

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