TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

Hi. I'm Sanjena Sathian. I'm a writer and the author of the new novel Goddess Complex. You're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. My name is Abhay Dandekar, and I share conversations with talented and interesting individuals linked to the global Indian and South Asian community.

It's informal and informative, adding insights to our evolving cultural expressions, where each person can proudly say, trust me, I know what I'm doing. Hi, everyone. On this episode of Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing, we share a conversation with novelist, journalist, and author of the new book Goddess Complex, Sanjena Sathian. Stay tuned. As always, thank you so much for listening and watching and making this a part of your day and a part of your life.

I know it takes time and effort, and so I appreciate everyone engaging, subscribing, rating, and writing reviews, and sharing this with all your friends and family. You can listen at all the podcast outlets, watch the episodes on YouTube, and follow along on social media at all the usual places. Now this was a few years ago when we first started. Trust me. I know what I'm doing.

But when we last checked in with journalist and author Sanjena Sathian, she had just released her book Gold Diggers, and we were chatting a lot about this wonderful Indian American coming of age story and some of her own writing experiences at a time when the book was starting development with Mindy Kaling into a television project. And just as this podcast continues to grow and evolve with time and age since then, so indeed has our global Indian and South Asian community with continued reflections, grapplings, and expressions that are part of an ongoing conversation about identity and purpose. Thankfully, as a next offering in this dialogue, especially in looking introspectively with both careful analysis and a healthy humor, it was simply great to catch up again with Sanjena just as she's released her second novel, Goddess Complex, abiding examination of millennial adulthood and the often fraught conversations around fertility and reproduction. Sanjena is an accomplished and award winning writer whose short stories and nonfiction essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other outlets. Goddess Complex is a sharp, witty, and biting character study of the present day globally aware millennial South Asian woman and the distinct dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting.

I'm taking a couple of cues from the inner liner notes, but in a world filled with girl bosses turned self care influencers, optimization cults, Internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and so much more, a twist filled psychothriller and feminist satire can serve to be a balm, a tickle machine, a question box, a haunted house, and some truth serum all at once. I caught up with Sanjena to chat about it all, and I first wanted to know how the idea of Goddess Complex was born and what that actually felt like. It was pretty halting, the birth of this thing. It was not a single bolt of inspiration. I started by I wanted to write about this relationship falling apart, between, two characters.

And I want I was interested in a woman's experience of realizing that she is two versions of herself, and particularly how that can happen in the course of a relationship. And that was a sort of starting premise. And I wrote about half the book from that premise. And then after I'd written a 50 pages and actually sold a 50 pages of the book to my publisher with a promise that I was halfway done and it would be another year and they would have the book, I realized that the project started on page a 51. So that was kind of humbling.

I realized that I wasn't actually that interested in the particular dynamics of this relationship falling apart. I was gonna have to rely on some kind of cheap tricks to make the reader make myself care about that relationship, make it feel surprising. Because ultimately, the book was leading to, surprise. This guy is sort of shitty, which isn't that interesting because often, we kind of, even though in life, it can take us a long time to figure out when someone is trustworthy and when they aren't, when we're reading, the reader has the, like, privilege and comfort of being a little bit further away and can see things more clearly. So I was I felt like there was something almost condescending about what I was trying to do.

And so I had to take a step back and realize, like, what was I interested in? It wasn't just the kind of universal experience of a relationship falling apart, but the very particular experience of a relationship falling apart over the discussion about whether or not to have children. And that felt like a significantly riskier story to tell because I think that our default assumption in a relatively pro natalist society, which is what we live in regardless of what JD Vance thinks. The assumption is that, if you have doubts about whether or not you want children, if you're ambivalent about parenthood or motherhood, or if you actively do not want it, there is something weird and wrong with you. And I realized that I had projected some of that onto the writing of the book itself.

Like, I was very afraid to write a character who did not want children and who was actively coming to terms with that. And once I realized that that's what I was truly interested in writing about, the book then unfurled. And it became a story that was more about a woman in conversation with herself and not a woman in conversation with a man. That was a big realization. That was sort of the inception point.

For you know, and it sounds like the, idea of having a relationship based story, but then the evolution of how you were having that conversation with yourself and, in fact, you know, sort of affirming a lot of the the thoughts that you were having. Was this something that you had, you know, conceived or even, like, thought about writing a while ago? But then, you know, as you said, like, this kind of took on its own life and and really then developed after you had that moment of saying that, like, nope. This this is not gonna be your traditional story at all. Yeah.

I mean, Gold Diggers, for instance, is a book that I had been trying to write for, like, twelve years. It was the story that I had in me from my early twenties. I started Goddess Complex in 2018, which now is a while ago. And I put aside many versions of it even before I got to that story, that that version of the story that I was telling you about. I think I think really the thing that I needed to say was I often start, I think, by being interested in kind of a phase of life and, how that phase of life, for me personally, fits into the zeitgeist.

Sort of the personal zeitgeist of my friends and me and then the larger kind of historical zeitgeist. And with Gold Diggers, I wanted to write my way through kind of adolescence and early twenties. And Goddess Complex became this book that felt pretty urgent about your thirties and kind of a coming of age story, for one's thirties. I I I was thinking about sort of juxtaposing the two together, and that's gonna be sort of the natural take that most people have after they've read Goddess Complex to sort of, like, think about gold diggers as a backdrop to it. And yet, you know, they're they're they're two very, very different links, at least for me as a reader.

For me, if gold diggers was sort of like the first window into your world as a novelist, this seemed like being with you in a room full of a thousand different mirrors and and showing sort of, like, so many different character elevations and avatars and egos. And and like you said, sort of like having this conversation with yourself, was there any concentration that was sort of necessary to really sort of get all those specific voices to coalesce? Or was it important to, in fact, you know, kind of, like, have different streams of thought and and not necessarily have them coalesce into a binding binding story. I really like the image of mirrors. It's kind of a trippy cool, image.

It's interesting. I think it it almost felt the opposite for me compositionally. Like, I think Gold Diggers felt like a massive, massive world and story with a lot of different characters. It spans a much longer period of time. It has multiple time jumps.

You know, it opens in the eighties, and then it jumps to the February, and then it jumps to the later twenty tens. And then there are these cutaways to the eighteen fifties. This book, by contrast, the bulk of the action takes place, the present day action takes place in a single summer. And there are the flashbacks basically only go as far as, like, a year or two, a few years earlier. So it's it's actually kind of much tighter project.

And Sure. In that sense, it was harder to write that way because it's harder to work in tighter confines. But it was also helpful to say, actually, this is going to be a significantly more narrow project. It's actually just going to be it's primarily about one person, and I am placing faith that the reader will access a wider universal experience through one particular person. Whereas I think with Gold Diggers, Gold Diggers felt a little more like what we might call a we novel.

And this is this is an I novel. And in that sense, it has more it has some in common with kind of the auto fiction that became very popular in the twenty tens, but it also makes a kind of meta turn so it's really not auto fiction because it gets so bonkers. Which is a very apropos word after reading it. Yes. The game for me was actually about kind of tightening and reducing and loosening.

And it is I think it's about 20,000 words shorter than gold diggers. It's like it's it's a significantly shorter book. Well, I like that. You know, the idea that, like, there are just so many you it's a it's a really tight window of time, and therefore, you have to compact so many things. And yet it doesn't feel like that.

It feels like there's, you know, so many versions of you that are actually, you know, coming through or so many versions of these these characters that are coming through. There was a real blend of speeds that I found, to the story. Like, there's sort of this careful patience in adding a lot of depth to a thought and you know, or a theme, and then this flowing description of a mood or a conversation, and then even sort of, like, this frantic urgency that you're getting, especially in in some places where the impulses are hitting you from from many different angles. Even though this was sort of a tight window of time, was that sort of an intentional calibration so that you could really portray millennial womanhood in your version, as as you wanted to tell it? I think that pacing is something I think a lot about.

And I think if I think about pacing as, like, the essential thing that is required for me to move from one chapter to the next. Otherwise, I won't sustain my interest. Yeah. So in that sense Which is key, by the way. Right?

I mean Yeah. And I say that to say, like, I think some writers think a lot about the reader's attention. And what's helpful for me is that I'm a reader who is bored easily. So I am my own reader who I'm testing against. And hopefully, if I've entertained myself, I just have to hope that I've entertained the reader as as well.

Yeah. But the book the book substance is about choice. Right? It's about whether or not to have a child. We meet this woman who has recently left her husband, and she is grappling with her own decision to move away from the sort of prescribed path of parenthood.

She went as far as to get pregnant and then have an abortion having changed her mind relatively late into her pregnancy. And that that means that I had to think about, like, when you if you're pregnant, you think in terms of weeks. There is a ticking clock around days and weeks that means something. But also if you are someone who is thinking about your sort of reproductive biological clock, I must tell you you're a physician, but you the years become very weighted. The month by month sort of, like, cycles when people are going through IVF and, like, tracking their ovulation.

There are time is weird when you're trying to think about reproduction. And so there were times when I needed to be thinking in terms of years flying by, and then there were times when I needed to be thinking in terms of, like, there's a sort of egg freezing subplot where, like, the exact day that you start your cycle becomes really important, and when do you start the egg freezing cycle in relation to that. So I think this sort of substance dictated the the pacing as as as was necessary. I I think of of any book or artistic expression, it's it could be a musical piece. It could be, a speech you're giving.

But in this case, of course, this artistic expression coming through your novel that there's there's clearly a lot of love and lots of other emotions involved, maybe angst at the same time as you put something together like this. But, you know, particularly for you personally, and as you mentioned, this is a a story and something that was being expressed as as a part of, you know, your own evolution in a way. What parts of this book did you actually perhaps torment over? Most of it. Yeah.

Was I mean, was it really sort of, like, this tortuous, like, development for you? Like, you know, this this was really a tormenting process to to get this out there. I mean, I think that I say that partly facetiously. Like, the whole thing is kind of tortuous to to eke out. But also, I think the book is semi satirical.

I hope people think it's funny. So as soon as I find a sense of humor in my pages, it is, like, less it's not torture anymore. Right? It's still, like, breaking things down structurally, that is, like, torture and and difficult. And it's hard to revise on a kind of plot level and make sure that everything fits and makes sense.

But the kind of emotional life I think a lot of the worst torture happened in the lead up to that, like, journey from the novel starts on page a 51. Mhmm. It all for me, I think, was about finding play and being willing to be funny or reverent or rude about things that people are supposed people think we're supposed to treat with kind of total sacredness and and sanctity. Yeah. So, yeah, I think humor is the way out of that for me.

Of that of that torment. Mhmm. You're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. After a quick break, we're gonna come back to our conversation with journalist and author Sanjena Sathian. Stay tuned.

Every story told is a lesson learned, and every lesson learned is a story waiting to be told. I'm Abhay Dandekar, and I share conversations with global Indians and South Asians so everyone can say, trust me, I know what I'm doing. New episodes weekly wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hi. I'm Vivek Murthy.

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Welcome back to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Let's rejoin our conversation now with the author of the new book Goddess Complex, Sanjena Sathian. Because humor and satire are from the angle of you and your voice, and it's an angle of one in many cases, you know, in order to pacify that torment a little bit, Is that a risk sometimes when you're writing? And on top of that, like, how is your ability to maybe take some of those risks changed as as your experience as a writer has now, you know, been cultivated and developed and and you have had success with your first novel. I mean, have you approached risk taking from the angle of writing satire and humor particularly?

Have you have you approached that any differently now this time? I think that writing what seal what I call semiconic fiction, because I'm not writing I'm not writing hard satire. Right? I'm not Paul Beatty. I'm not Percival Everett whose work I love.

But those people are hard satire. Like, the joke is the sole engine of or the central engine of their work, and that helps them make big, sharp political points. I think for me, jokes are kind of part of the conceits of the novel. Like, in some ways, it's funny to say this is a book about a woman who does not wanna have children, and the joke is she can't get away from her other self who is so insistent on wanting children that she kind of gets chased down. So that is a little bit of a joke.

Like, the doppelganger conceit is fundamentally funny, I think. But I think that my ultimately, like, the humor for me lives in the voice and in the character's consciousness. So in that sense, like, it's not really a risk because I don't have a choice because the character is who she is. My characters are the way they are. My voice is what it is.

So if I don't write that way, I won't write well, and I've tried to write other ways. The flip side the thing that's, I think, hard to wrap your brain around, like, now at this stage when I'm putting the thing into the world is I think sometimes a lot of contemporary fiction is, like, incredibly humorless and, like, incredibly sanctimonious. And if you try to be funny, there is a risk that you will be taken less seriously, that people won't see the sort of social and political substance of the project and that they won't treat it as as much of a literary object. That is, like, a hard frustrating thing, and it's not something that I can control. It's also interesting because, literally, gold diggers got treated.

People called it a satire. Like, a the novel was a satire, which it's not. It is I think it's semi comic. But people called it kind of firmly a comedy. And then I came to Hollywood, and we were working on the adaptation.

And it's firmly a drama in Hollywood. Mhmm. So it's a drama with some comedic elements. But, like, that just, I think, goes to show you that the language we we use to categorize art in the marketplace is pretty flawed, and separating the comedic from the dramatic is often kind of fruitless and and just says more about us as audiences and our inability to meet projects in their fullness. Like, when I teach, I often tell students, like, having a sense of humor is not it's not an extra thing.

Like, if there is if your work is devoid of humor, that to me is as bad as your work being devoid of an emotional life. It is Mhmm. Humor is part of, like, the palette of human existence. And if you don't have access to that as a writer, I think you're not gonna be a very good writer. What's funny is is that, you know, I read Percival Everett's James literally just before I read Goddess Complex.

And so, you know, the idea of of this and the emotions that they they lead up to and what's your sort of, I guess, gradation of humor or satire. That definitely does a matter on your own on the reader's mood as well. I mean, just that I'm personally speaking, and and I'm in no way, shape, or form someone who's, you know, an avid avid reader. I have a lot of experience with this, and there's some naivete there. But I think you're right that, like, you know, if you're if you're void of of some grade of humor, then, you know, that that's at least a challenge.

There was one line that I remember reading in the book where Sanjena is at the therapist, and she very contemplatively shares, that I don't regret being myself. And that line sort of struck me a little bit in that. I wonder how do you think that particular reflection, if at all, somehow is very specific and resonant for the millennial South Asian woman and her experience, particularly in in The United States? Yeah. I mean, that's a complex sentiment in the book because there is a later point where she does kind of say the opposite.

She says, actually, I wish I could be a different person. And that desire to be a different person ends up taking her down a few different other very strange paths. But I think you're right to say that that's, like, one of the central kind of concerns of the book. If we broadly talk about many elements of South Asian and South Asian American society as leaning towards the collectivist, and I put a big asterisk here because I make fun of the tend tendency to generalize our culture this way in the book. Right.

Because it is it is silly to act as though we are a monolith. But, Yeah. Totally. With that asterisk, when you do have social values that tend towards the communal, there is a natural and necessary erasure of the individual. Mhmm.

And that very often, I think I think it affects all of us. Like, my my first book was about, in many ways, how that erased the experience of a teenage boy and a young man. I think that that happens maybe to an additional or more more specific degree to women who are expected to be the sort of, like, bearers of tradition. Like, I often think about the fact that many and I'm gonna talk here kind of specifically about Indian American women and particularly kind of, like, dominant cast Hindus. For women like us, the expectation is that we will carry the traditional values from the motherland into the diaspora.

So Yeah. Many of us when we're kids, we're sent off to dance classes and kind of to learn the sort of tradition and the culture. And it is a little less common for boys to be given that same degree of expectation. Then that becomes kind of even more intense when you reach your twenties and thirties and people are expecting and hoping that you will marry and enter a heterosexual, heteronormative union that will produce babies. Right.

Those are and I don't wanna generalize to you, so you should tell me if if you disagree. But I think that No. I mean, I have a follow-up thought to this one. Like, you said the asterisk is is there, and and I'll even make the asterisk even wider, you know, of a of a prologue to this question. And and that is is that as you're going through this, I'm thinking, like, well, in in the same way, like, for men who are reading the book, what should their reflection on that on that takeaway, you know, be?

For that matter, the Manishas of the world who are reading the book, what should their takeaway be? I mean, there's there's so many different ways that those readers can actually filter what they read and and sort of transpose it or not onto their own experience as well. And I'm just curious, like, you know, as you're as you're saying all these things particularly, like, these are these are actually important, you know, ways to to look at the world from the South Asian American or the Indian American vantage point. But I'm just curious if if that at all factored into as you're writing this and even as now you're reflecting on this as the book is coming out and and as people are reading it, are those being magnified in any way, especially as different people are reading it from their own lens? Yeah.

Yeah. I have heard from a handful of early readers, and it's really interesting to hear from male readers who I think men are protected from understanding, like, how babies arrive in the world. And I don't just mean the biological process. I mean the social process. Yeah.

I have a lot of male friends who are progressive, thoughtful feminists who still did not really realize until they had female partners, and they began negotiating when or whether they were going to have children with those partners, they did not understand what it took, what the emotional and internal cost for those female partners was gonna be. And, like, that makes me angry. Like, there is there is a degree of anger that I think is in the pages of the book because it just sucks and is really unjust that only Yeah. Half the population has to think about this and how ins how deeply we have to think about this. Like, I think a lot of men just believe that babies arrive spontaneously, and they don't understand what kinds of internal negotiations their often female partners have to go through to bring those those children into the world.

And they don't understand why it might not be a choice that those people wanna make. And so I have heard recently, I heard from someone who now has an adorable, lovely baby. And he told me, you know, that baby almost didn't exist because he and his wife were stuck in these debates for several years. And they didn't really tell anyone. They didn't have anyone to discuss it with.

It felt I think he didn't say this, but I wondered if there was a degree of shame around the fact that there were disagreements at all. And so I I think to get to your question, like, if there's anything I'm interested in, it's the fact that there is a choice and that there are infinite myriad choices that go into whether or not we procreate and reproduce. And I hope that I think that's true that the larger kind of societal culture in America needs to be need we all need to question that, and we all need to have a discussion about that. And then there are particularities to the South Asian community where we really need to check about why we don't have a relationship to those many choices. And the last thing I'll say is I wrote a critical essay a few years ago, about several novels that were kind of about reproductive choice.

And I read a piece of I read I read a book of literary criticism by a male scholar who was writing about kind of procreative choice in the the history of the novel. And he said he was sort of tracing things from DH Lawrence to Doris Lessing to contemporary like Sheila Heady and writers like that. And there was a degree of scorn in his scholarship where he was sort of like, why are we so obsessed with whether or not to have children? Why are people so skeptical? Like, babies bring new life.

Like, we should be interested in the question of new life. And he explicitly at one point in the in the scholarship says, he doesn't think that or he wonders whether the the kind of waffling about reproduction is sufficient material for a novel, which I found such a wild thing to say and such an ignorant thing to say because it suggests that, like, if this man has children, like, I I don't wanna know what's going on in terms of, like, what negotiations happened in that life because it there it is a full rich phase of choosing. Like, you you become yourself as you make the choices you make in arranging a life and arranging an adulthood, and procreation or not procreating is part of that choice, and it shapes us. No. Ab absolutely.

And, I mean, you know, this this book certainly made me think a little bit in along those parallel lines of, you know, when my wife and I were were having those discussions. And I wonder for you as you were going through both the writing and now, obviously, the reflection process, and that'll happen more and more as more and more readers, you know, give you feedback about it. But, you know, what do you think you perhaps learned or have gained in the writing process, but particularly at that intersection of fertility and reproduction from the immigrant vantage point? Because, basically, a lot of this is is a little bit complicated or perhaps magnified or or, you know, a different version of this is happening for those who are part of the immigrant family process or children of the immigrant family process just because of all the other baggage and burdens that that are placed on many of those families. As you rightfully said, that many women are supposed to be bearing that that sort of responsibility of the culture at the same time.

So, I mean, did did was there a learning process for you that particularly from that immigrant vantage point has taken on new life, especially? I think the kind of first order assumptions we have about South Asian immigrant families are what what I said initially. Like, there is a burden to carry on tradition. And so naturally, that burden to carry on tradition will live in, like, the bloodline. And so for a lot of families, that is true.

You are expected to procreate because it is part of the sort of, like, social values. And resisting that can be a resistance to the wider social values. I will say the more I wrote and had conversations with members of my community, including my family, the more I understood how much texture there is within this kind of seemingly monolithic experience. Mhmm. Like, I think a lot of times when I mentioned, like, I'm probably not gonna have kids, people say, oh, is that like, what does your mom say?

Like, you have an immigrant mom. That must be they must be really upset about that. And the truth is, my mother was actually one of the first people to be incredibly supportive of that decision. When I told her I was around 27 or 28, when I said, I think I'm leaning against. She was like, yeah.

Totally get it. Like Right. She was she worked outside the home. She had kind of a very strong identity outside of motherhood even though motherhood was important to her. And I think part of the reason that she had that other identity was because even though it's very common for immigrants to say, like, we came here for a better life for our children, they also came here for a better life for themselves.

And part of a better life for herself was to have an identity that was not just being an Indian woman, Indian wife, Indian mother. Like, she came here because she wanted more, and part of having more was being more than just a mother in addition to however much mother had mattered to her. And so, actually, there were things that were innate to her experience as an immigrant that I think made her actually very understanding of this choice. And so if people read this and kind of are having their own tortured relationship with their own immigrant families, I would just encourage them to think kind of more expansively and curiously about what the immigrant experience might mean and all of its textured variations because it is as varied as, like, there are people. No.

And I love that. I mean, I I do think that we we often do I wouldn't say ignore, but we definitely, you know, tend to sweep under the rug the the value of self when it comes to, the immigrant experience as opposed to just simply the communal version of it. You're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. After a quick break, we'll come back to our conversation with author Sanjena Sathian. Stay tuned.

Every story told is a lesson learned, and every lesson learned is a story waiting to be told. I'm Abhay Dandekar, and I share conversations with global Indians and South Asians so everyone can say, trust me, I know what I'm doing. New episodes weekly wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hi. I'm Krish Ashok, author of Masala Lab, The Science of Idiot Cooking, and you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing.

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This is Vidya Balan, and you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Hi there. I'm Abhay Dandekar, and you're listening to Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing. Let's rejoin our conversation now with author Sanjena Sathian. I'm always curious about whenever there's any kind of, expression about balance measures.

And and hear me out in this. I'm trying to equate sort of the way we look at quality, improvement in health care to what this actually is. And I I don't know if there's a true link here, but just, you know, bear with me on this one. There there just are a lot of really sort of complex and challenging things about being an Indian American woman in her thirties. And the book certainly speaks to revealing so much of that, and it speaks with some tight satire, you know, about all of this, which which is really refreshing and welcome, of course.

But out of all those things that are so complex and difficult and actually curiosities and questions that we really should be asking from this, are there are there some things that became clarified as to how simple or easy or the things that are assumed or maybe even taken for granted or even privileged about the experience of being a 20 20 or 30 South Asian American or Indian American woman to pose these questions in the first place or or to be able to have that agency, to be able to do so? Was there anything that that is equally a balanced measure to reveal there? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do think privilege is important to talk about anytime we talk about the Indian American diaspora because as a group, we skew so privileged.

And something I was thinking this may not be an exact answer to your question, but something I was thinking a lot about as I wrote the book. I'm not sure, by the way, my question has an exact answer in the first place. So well, so the book is about reproductive choice. But if we zoom out and remember what that phrase means and where it comes from, The phrase actually has gotten a lot of criticism because it comes out of second wave movements of relatively well off feminists who are saying, like, having choice means the right to say no, the right to refuse to have a child. And black feminists for several generations have said that that is too narrow and too privileged of a framework for thinking about kind of childbearing and reproduction.

And actually, we need this larger framework of reproductive justice, which includes the right to have a child if that is what you want. And that comes out of a history of being, like, forcibly sterilized and having children taken away from you by the state, and having your parenting policed and judged. And so one thing that is, I think, like, I have thought a lot about and the book is the book is often kind of it is it is primarily about the experience of one single woman whose internal battle is to control her own body. But I have thought a lot about how that fits into this larger kind of framework of reproductive justice. And the book is just one narrow literary object.

It can't represent all of those views, but I think that if people consume it, they understand that it fits into this, like, larger category that is important if we're gonna understand liberation, which is kind of a political project that exists outside of the book. And it's something that we need to think about and talk about right now because the actual kind of right to choose is imperiled, but also implicated in the right to choose are the the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion are all of these other rights that relate to reproductive justice, like access to fertility care for people who do wanna have children and access to third party forms of parenting like surrogacy for queer couples. So I don't know. It all kind of fits in. Like, I think if you start by feeling kind of narrowly defensive about choice, which is where I started, you can lose that it's kind of part of this larger struggle.

And understanding that it's part of this larger struggle is very freeing because it means that you can connect your personal desires or aversions to other peoples that are very varied. And that was that was kind of a a a journey that I went on politically, but also, like, emotionally. Does that make sense? It totally does. Yeah.

And I mean, I think the the naivete of saying that this is a position of privilege without actually, you know, going digging a little deeper and and understanding some of those nuances and then the sort of political intricacies of it. You know, we talked about JD Vance in the beginning of this, which, you know, I'm not I'm never, apt to try and do, but, the idea of of this is actually really important, I think, to analyze, in that way. And I and I'm I'm so glad that you brought that up. In in thinking about that and maybe some of the other grapplings that you had to do in in writing this, both from the vantage point of a writer and for that matter as a Indian American. What did you actually have to unlearn about yourself in order to write this book?

That's a beautiful question. What did I have to unlearn? Well, I think first, I had to unlearn some shame around my own desires and aversions. I had to learn that it was okay to not want things that the world tells me I should want. But then second order, I had to learn that my own kind of coming to terms with my own desires did not preclude me from connecting with other people's very different desires.

Like, I think the book itself is a journey from someone who has to be fiercely protective and defensive of her own body because there are people like, she had she is in a marriage where someone really wants her to be pregnant. And she has to kind of physically save herself from that because that is not what she wants. But Right. Then her kind of defensiveness and protectiveness causes her to close down from the world. And the journey is, I think, a little bit of her opening opening up to the world again.

And I think that's a kind of a a journey that I went on while writing the book as well is going from kind of a position of, like, crouched defensiveness to a position of curiosity about other people's experiences in addition to my own. And a lot of the people who you know, a friend of mine who read the book, Roshani Chokshi, who is, a young adult and middle grade author, and also writes some adult literary, some adult fiction. She read the book when her daughter had been born, like, four weeks early. Earlier, she had, like, a baby strapped to her chest when she was reading this book. So it was all about how this person doesn't want a baby.

And I was incredibly nervous. And she was so unbelievably generous. And it helped me understand that actually, I think we we sometimes, particularly women, act as though, like, one person's experience crowds out another. And there's a reason for that, which is if two people are pregnant and one person thinks that what they are carrying is a baby and to end that pregnancy is to end a life and someone else feels exactly the opposite, like, those are two competing competing interpretations of the same experience, and that is dangerous. And we do have to be protected in the face of that.

But Yeah. Also, having multiple kind of forms of language around the same experience if you if you can reach it from kind of a place of abundance is very freeing. And having people like Roshni read the book and be generous in response, I think, helped me see how clearly articulating one experience of the world can actually open up space for a lot more kinds of experience. Maggie Nelson in the Argonauts writes that it's not really the language of it's a choice or it's a child. It's it's a choice and a child, and we all know that.

And she's not saying, like, literally that you are pregnant with a baby and to end that that pregnancy is to kill it. She is saying more largely that, like, both of those things can be true, and we have to have kind of social, emotional, and political frameworks that can make space for both of those things. Yeah. Whether it's thoughts or ideas or people. Right?

I mean, they don't have to be constantly competing with each other and and this notion that there are many, many different parallel lanes that can be true at the same time. I think of that when I particularly am thinking of all the different avatars in this book that that struck me. Right? Whether that's Sanjena, whether that is Sunny, whether that is Sanjena, Sathiananda, Kilian, and Kalyan, and all of these very different, you know, sort of playful avatars, if you will, being kind of small little, again, mirrors or or expressions that come about in that book. When you say that this is all sort of a conversation that you're having, is it everyone's version of that great book called You're Your Own Worst Frenemy?

Is that just sort of like the constant conversation that many of us seem to be having in sort of curating all of these different egos or avatars? Yeah. Maybe. I think you're right. Yeah.

There's we're all what I meant when I said that it's an iBook, I don't mean I hope it doesn't feel like a selfish book because actually, I think we all there is something really interesting about examining the self as kind of a multifaceted and multiplicitous thing. We all contain many selves. And being in touch with all of those is a really interesting way to not just, like, make be in better touch with ourselves, but also be in better touch with kind of a wider society. It's almost like a that's kind of the practice of, like, a Buddhist compassion meditation is to understand how the many selves that you contain in your in in your own identity and ego are the many selves of the world. And if you can be empathetic to all of them, you can be empathetic to more people.

I'll get you out of here on this, and I asked you this last time as well. But I'm so curious, you know, particularly now that this, you know, next, expression is is out there in goddess complex. But how will this book change the way you live your life and maybe even how you grow as a writer? I mean, I think it it loosened some of my own anxieties and expectations around my thirties, which is something that I think, like, if gold diggers helped me almost, like, exercise some of my stuff around achievement and ambition culture, This has helped me work through some of, my own thoughts and feelings about childbearing. So I feel looser.

I feel more at peace with my own decisions. And then as a writer, I mean, making it through a sophomore novel is, like, a big milestone. It's people often say that it is the hardest. So I have no idea if that's true. It would be great if that's true.

Right. But I do feel like I I do feel I'm working on some new stuff that I'm not ready to talk about yet except to say that I feel more agile as a writer. So yeah. Knock on wood. Well well, feeling more agile as a writer, getting more agility as a reader, I think it's all very appreciated.

And, of course, readers are gonna be continuing to tap into the Sanjena verse, as they say, one page at a time. And I'm certainly enjoying the ride and really such a treat to to visit with you again. I hope we can do so again down the road. Sanjena, thank you so, so much. This was really, really, a special conversation, and, best of luck with everything.

Thanks for having me back. It was really fun. Thanks so much, Sanjena. And please check out Goddess Complex, available everywhere. Once again, if you're enjoying these conversations, please take a moment to write a kind review and follow along on social media and share this with someone you know.

Till next time. I'm Abhay Dandekar.