Writers at the Wrecking Bar Presents Sanjena Sathian in conversation with Tayari Jones - Goddess Complex
Tuesday, Mar 11, 2025 7:00 PM
Location:
The Marianna Room at the Wrecking Bar Brewpub
292 Moreland Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30307
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.
At the March edition of Writers at the Wrecking Bar, A Cappella Books welcomes acclaimed author Sanjena Sathian to celebrate the release of her latest book, "Goddess Complex." The author will appear in conversation with Atlanta's own Tayari Jones, award-winning author of "An American Marriage."
Presented in partnership with Stuckey's.
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 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.
About the Author
Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel "Gold Diggers," which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It won the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction appears in "The Best American Short Stories," The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Boulevard, and more. She’s written nonfiction for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Drift, The Yale Review, and NewYorker.com, among other outlets. She’s an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at Emory University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In spring 2025, she will serve as the Ferrol A. Sams Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University. "Goddess Complex" is her second novel.
About the Conversation Partner
New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently "An American Marriage." Published in 2018, "An American Marriage" is an Oprah's Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama's summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), Aspen Words Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries.
Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
About Writers at the Wrecking Bar
A Cappella Books presents Writers at the Wrecking Bar, a series of live author interview events showcasing some of the country's freshest voices in literary and contemporary fiction. Each program includes writers in conversation with an arbiter of Atlanta's book scene, giving the audience a chance to experience and participate in the Q&A and get a signed copy of the book. Held upstairs in the Marianna Room of the Wrecking Bar Brewpub, Writers at the Wrecking Bar hosts a cash bar, starting at 7 PM. The author conversation and book signing follow at 7:30 PM.
