Tune in on 8 August for an exciting and illuminating discussion around Sanjena Sathian’s GODDESS COMPLEX—a thrilling, bitingly satirical novel about the complexities of femininity, parenthood and social norms in the modern age. Sanjena will be in conversation with Nirica Srinivasan on Champaca’s YouTube channel, and the video will also be available on YouTube after the session.
Here are the details of the event:
Date: 8 August 2025, Friday
Time: 7:30PM
YouTube Live Link: https://www.youtube.com/live/gy30cyhfFcw?si=pZJTD6MpdF-RrE22
About the book:
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, genre-bending 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, social media mommy gurus, egg-freezing crazes, procreative peer pressure, and general uterine madness.
About the speakers:
Sanjena Sathian is a writer and essayist who lives in Hong Kong. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novels GODDESS COMPLEX and GOLD DIGGERS. Her short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, and more. She also writes for screen, and has bylines in The New York Times, The Yale Review, and The New Yorker, among others.
She’s an alumna of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has taught fiction at Emory University, Mercer University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University.
Moderating the session is Nirica Srinivasan, a writer, editor, and illustrator. She is the curator of Champaca Bookstore, interviews editor at Write or Die Magazine, and contributing editor of fiction at Interlocutor Interviews. She is passionate about all forms of storytelling, from literature to cinema to music. At any point in time, she can be found reading at least six books, and excited to talk about all of them.