Second Life - by Amanda Hess (Hardcover)

About the Book

""Before I was pregnant, I was a person." The long awaited debut memoir about the convergence of parenthood and technology from the beloved New York Times critic. In 2016, when Amanda arrived at the New York Times to become its correspondent for internet culture, a colleague asked her a question that sounded like a riddle: "On the internet, how do you know what's really real?" He had been looking for a literal answer, but Amanda recognized the question as something more profound, an irresolvable provocation that defines the experience of life in the digital age. For more than a decade, Amanda has been on the reality beat, living the contradictions of the internet even as she has tried to make sense of them. But when she discovered she was pregnant with her first child, who later received a prenatal diagnosis of Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome-a genetic disorder-she was unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis all her own, vulnerable to the world of apps, gadgets, bloggers, online forums, and advertisers, all closing in, telling her what to do and how to feel. They promised that her new life-and by extension, her child's-would be so much better if she bought this or that, tried this or that. As the internet sought to remap her body and her mind, Amanda's guiding question became ever more urgent: what is "real life" when creating a life? Second Life is a trenchant look at parenting in early 21st-century America, when humans stopped being raised by villages or even families but rather by a constant onslaught of information. It is a funny, heartbreaking, and surreal examination of fertility apps, the history of ultrasound technologies, prenatal genetic testing, rare disease Facebook groups, baby memes, cultural representations of parenting, gender reveal videos, trendy sleep gurus, "freebirth" influencers, mommy marketers, culminating in a polemic on how to conceive of a real life in the digital age. Page by page, Amanda reveals the unspoken ways that our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology, all through the exacting lens of her intensely personal story"--

Book Synopsis

"Hess's debut memoir bursts with humor and intelligence as it weaves the story of her own pregnancy....This unexpected page-turner is as vulnerable as it is sharp." --Vulture

As an internet culture critic for The New York Times, Amanda Hess had built a reputation among readers as a sharp observer of the seductions and manipulations of online life. But when Hess discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own.

In the summer of 2020, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess's baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search sucked her into the destabilizing morass of the internet, and she was vulnerable--more than ever--to conspiracy, myth, judgment, commerce, and obsession.

As Hess documents her escalating relationship with the digital world, she identifies how technologies act as portals to troubling ideologies, ethical conflicts, and existential questions, and she illuminates how the American traditions of eugenics, surveillance, and hyper-individualism are recycled through these shiny products for a new generation of parents and their children.

At once funny, heartbreaking, and surreal, Second Life is a journey that spans a network of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, "freebirth" influencers, and hospital reality shows. Hess confronts technology's distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son's early life. The result is a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.

Review Quotes

A Most Anticipated Book of 2025: Vulture - Lit Hub - The Los Angeles Times - TIME

"Engrossing...With a reporter's gimlet eye, Hess lenses out from her personal experience...[She] has a (hilariously reluctant) native's ear for the (awful) millennial marketing sound." --The New York Times

"Second Life is not mainly a medical odyssey but, rather, a mordant contemplation of the many screens...that reflected and mediated Hess's experience of pregnancy and early motherhood....[It] is foremost a mash note to Hess's firstborn son...the book's charisma is rooted in its mood of droll astonishment....Despite the oracular hubris of the genetic-screening vanguard, the story a parent wants has only one primary source, one reliable narrator. You have to wait for him." --Jessica Winter, The New Yorker

"Hess trains her critic's eye on her own life, probing both the effect of the internet on maternal guilt and anxiety (a nearly universal condition) and the more specific challenges of her own motherhood journey....Smart, funny, and filled with love."
--The Boston Globe

"With wit, discernment and candor...[Hess] captures the anxiety and weirdness of reproduction in our modern screen-based, app-oriented culture....Insightful...very funny." --The Wall Street Journal

"Exceptional. . . .Impeccably blends tech skepticism, cultural criticism and memoir. . . .Hess is a savvy, charmingly acerbic analyst. . . .[She] writes with a calm, uncloying sympathy for anyone eager to allay their concerns by discovering more about their offspring. . . .[A] book about knowing, [with] striking, beautiful moments." --The Washington Post

"Spot-on and brutally funny....Hess smartly paints herself as just another willing victim of the internet, a contradiction that speaks to how so many people view their online habits." --The Atlantic

"A smart, well-observed memoir. . . .Clear-eyed. . . .It could have been easy to dunk on the dystopia of it all, but Hess avoids that easy path, staying in the muddled middle where most of us live." --The New Republic

"With an investigative eye and a sense of humor (tempered by an appropriate amount of alarm), Hess. . . probe[s] the larger phenomena influencing the act (and industry) of reproduction. . . .Second Life is not only a book for parents; it's for anyone intrigued (and concerned) by the ways in which our digital footprints impact the circle of life itself." --Elle

"Hess's debut memoir bursts with humor and intelligence as it weaves the story of her own pregnancy....This unexpected page-turner is as vulnerable as it is sharp."
--Vulture

"[Hess] connects her experiences to excellent research." --The Los Angeles Times

"Second Life isn't the new What to Expect When You're Expecting. Hess isn't offering parenting tips to tech-savvy caretakers. Instead, she takes readers on an eye-opening adventure down the parenting internet rabbit hole." --TIME

"A truly amazing book." --Liana Finck, illustrator and author of Passing for Human

"Second Life is...a powerful firsthand account of how digital cultures are distorting and radicalizing parental decision making." --Science Magazine

"Second Life is the best account of the perinatal period since Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions (1993), sounding out the tender and weird ways in which we create our own user's manual for parenthood." --The Observer

"Hess brings to her subject humility, curiosity, and a sly, self-aware wit. . . Sweeping and incisive. . . Fresh and complicated. . . A captivating, charged, and crucially provocative consideration of motherhood in modern America."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"[A] fierce and funny debut memoir. . . .An astute document of pregnancy and parenting in the internet era. . . .Incisive and refreshing." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The story of a crisis-born odyssey, Second Life charts a new mother's descent into and re-emergence from the internet's 'pregnant underworld' with clarity, rigor, and tremendous wit. That such a deft a vivisector of our digital age should find herself lost in its churn of data-brokerage, commerce, and myth is a reminder of what we're all up against, and an engine of Amanda Hess's bracing and eloquent memoir."
--Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame

"Amanda Hess is that rare thing, the real deal. Second Life is unexpected, intellectually rigorous, funny, beautiful; and the wisdom is hard-won. A major debut from a profoundly talented writer."
--Claire Dederer, bestselling author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

"Second Life is a treat....Hess takes us on fascinating detours into the history of fetal imaging...feminism's flirtation with eugenics, and the origins of what we now think of as 'natural childbirth'....A tender and often very funny memoir....Hess is a generous thinker, even when she's up against ideologies that repel her." --The Cut

"There is no better chaperone than Amanda Hess through the strange world of surveillance, monetization, bureaucracy, and alternative medicine to which pregnant people and mothers are subjected."
--Max Read, editor of Read Max and former editor-in-chief of Gawker

"Only Amanda Hess could step through the blue light looking glass of our phones and explore her specific--and our collective--anxiety, dissociation, data points, targeted ads, and apps; she emerges a more sensate, embodied, and sharper critic. The honesty of Second Life took my breath away."
--Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor and Like a Mother

"Second Life is an incredibly urgent and moving investigation into the business of pregnancy and motherhood in our divided, digital age...Occasionally harrowing, frequently hilarious, and deeply original."
--Thomas Page McBee, Lambda award-winning author of Amateur and Man Alive

"Finally, a book about parenthood that acknowledges that the internet is the first place we go to navigate pregnancy. Hess doesn't demonize or valorize it but rather serves as a smart--and very amusing--guide to the good, the bad, and the truly weird of how we give birth today."
--Marisa Meltzer, author of the New York Times bestselling Glossy

About the Author

AMANDA HESS is a critic at large for The New York Times. She writes about internet and pop culture for the Arts section and con­tributes regularly to The New York Times Maga­zine. Hess has worked as an internet columnist for Slate magazine, an editor at Good magazine, and an arts and nightlife columnist at the Wash­ington City Paper, and has served as the second vice president for the NewsGuild of New York, a union representing media workers. She has also written for such publications as ESPN The Magazine, Wired, and Pacific Standard, where her feature on the online harassment of women won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest.