Sanjena, congratulations on “Goddess Complex.” It is a triumph. The novel tackles the deeply personal yet universally relevant topic of reproductive choice and motherhood. What compelled you to explore this particular aspect of contemporary womanhood, and how did the story of Sanjana and her doppelgänger first emerge in your imagination?

Thank you! I don’t start with a topic, though that is what the book ended up being about. I start with a set of emotional and intellectual obsessions, a conceit, a character — some combination of those things. In this case, I began with character: I was trying to write about a woman named Sanjana, who would appear similar to me, and who was trying to unravel something that had happened in her past, particularly around her relationship. I wanted to say something about what it feels like to be in a relationship that alters you so that you struggle to even recognize yourself. That set of ideas led me to the doppelganger conceit.

But I found that that version of the novel came out sort of unsurprising. I kept asking myself what about this relationship had transformed Sanjana beyond her own understanding or recognizability. The answer became pretty clear: children. The choice we make about whether to have them or not is one of the most fundamental choices we can make. The doppelganger conceit was actually even better suited for this version of the novel.

The novel features a fascinating device where your protagonist encounters another version of herself—literally sharing your own first name. Can you discuss the decision to blur the lines between author, narrator, and character? How did this meta-fictional element serve the themes you were exploring?

Yes, the protagonist of the novel is Sanjana Satyananda, and at one point she meets a woman named Sanjena Sathian (my name), who serves a sort of antagonistic function. It’s sort of an insane thing I did, but, I don’t know — that’s just what the conceit was, what it had to be. I considered at various points naming them both Sana or Sandhya or something like that, but I felt that using my name, and variations on my name, was the important thing. I’m playing with the reader’s expectations of the real in this novel, asking you to notice that I’m both describing reality and making reality feel a little unstable, a little odd.

The purpose of playing with reality is a) it’s fun, and b) it’s a way to critique social norms. If I can destabilize a reader’s sense of reality, I might also be inviting them to think about what they take for granted in their day-to-day life that is strange and deserves reconsideration. Ultimately, that’s my subject in this book and a lot of my work: normalcy, and how strange it is.

The book beautifully captures the tension between traditional South Asian familial values and contemporary urban sensibilities. How do you see reproductive expectations particularly affecting South Asian American women, and what specific cultural pressures did you want to illuminate?

I think the novel speaks to those issues because Sanjana is a brown girl who has a bad relationship with her family, largely because they don’t understand her, but also because she’s sort of an asshole to them. However, the book is really not about the classic “reproductive expectation” trope that comes to mind for many people: your parents want you to have babies because you come from a communal culture, or because the culture is so family-oriented that women’s bodies are property.

For Sanjana’s family, it’s a little subtler: you have babies because it’s what you do. No one is mad at her that she isn’t having babies, but if she doesn’t have one, they don’t know what to do with her. I think it’s so easy for us to say “yes of course pronatalist pressures on women are bad and obviously sexist.” It’s simple to say “your parents shouldn’t pressure you to have a child.” It’s harder to say, “even if people ostensibly are OK with you not having a child, they struggle to imagine what else your life can be — what else your worth can be… and that’s kind of messed up.”

Your novel offers a sharp critique of wellness culture and fertility entrepreneurship. What research did you conduct into the world of fertility retreats and reproductive technology? How did you balance satire with sensitivity given that many readers may be struggling with fertility issues?

Well, I trust that readers will be able to see that I’m not satirizing people struggling with infertility; I’m satirizing the fertility industrial complex and fertility influencers that prey on people struggling with infertility. I have a lot of friends who’ve dealt with fertility issues over the past few years, and they brought to my attention the weirdness of Internet spaces that lead them to develop parasocial relationships with influencers or just online strangers.

I did a lot of reading, especially anthropological studies on the fertility industry. I really recommend the book The Art of Waiting by Belle Boggs, which is a fantastic critical memoir about fertility and infertility. I also did a lot of social media stalking, because I was writing about an influencer, and I wanted to get that language right.

One of the most powerful aspects of the novel is how it explores the psychological aftermath of reproductive decisions. The protagonist mourns “the loss of a version of me who was more fathomable to the world” after an abortion. Can you speak to how our choices around parenthood shape not just our lives but our very sense of self?

The decisions we make about whether or not to have a child maybe shouldn’t be such a big deal, but for many of us, they do end up being really important. It’s one of the first truly binary life decisions that people make, and it probably has a lot to do with confronting our own mortality: a finite decision means you’re not pure young person potential anymore. You’re starting to really become yourself, and settling into a version of yourself — a good one, a bad one — can be scary because it’s definitive. Growing up is frightening because it involves a necessary foreclosure of many selves. I’m exploring this through the lens of reproductive choice, but it’s a more universal experience I’m writing about: it’s just hard to become yourself. But it’s also necessary.

The novel captures a particular moment of millennial anxiety—watching peers hit traditional milestones while feeling stuck between identities. How do you see your generation’s relationship with conventional markers of adulthood, and what unique pressures do millennial women face around reproductive choice?

I can speak to the American millennial experience. We grew up in a time of a lot of economic instability. Our lives are unaffordable and the planet is on fire. We also had access to a lot more gender equality — not enough, but more than prior generations. We had access to unprecedented medical technologies like egg freezing, which became commercially available around when I graduated from college. But we’re also watching our reproductive rights roll back and seeing a huge backlash against feminism. How the fuck are we supposed to feel confident about any of our decisions? Many of us want MANY things, not nothing, and don’t know how to arrange our lives to have htem.

Here’s the thing, though. I have conversations with people from other generations all the time who say things like, “well, it was hard for us, too, but we just decided.” And I have news: it’s not a flex to say, “I made this incredibly complex decision and didn’t think that hard about it, why are you thinking hard about it?” That’s crazy! It’s not good that people can’t afford to have the children they want to have in America, which is the case, but at least millennials’ ambivalence — which means not wanting nothing but wanting two things simultaneously — leads us to think really carefully about a decision that deserves serious consideration.

The novel shifts from literary fiction into psychological thriller territory as Sanjana’s grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous. What drew you to this genre-blending approach, and how did you maintain the balance between psychological realism and surreal elements?

I pretty much always do something with genre as I write. My first novel blends magical realism and social realism. This one plays with the real and the uncanny. I take this approach for the reasons I mentioned above: it’s fun, and it’s also a way of destabilizing social norms.

I was drawing on the tradition of the Gothic, as in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and I also read a lot of literary thrillers — Patricia Highsmith, James Lasdun — to get the pacing right. Those are writers who never let character falter even as they work really hard to raise your heartrate. It’s a weird myth that plot and character have to work against one another. They serve each other.

Could you recommend some of your favourite books for the readers of our magazine?

Favorites are hard, but here are a few books I love: The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. Mating by Norman Rush. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.

What do you think about our feminist magazine, Usawa Literary Review?

I’m so glad to know of your work. Your mission is very moving, and I think it will speak to not only Indians in India but a huge number of diasporic South Asians who also want to hear more varied stories. We’re not a monolith.