Second Life

Having a Child in the Digital Age

By: Amanda Hess

“Second Life is a tender, perceptive account of pregnancy and early motherhood—and a stylish confrontation with the demented landscape of digital parenting content.” —Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley

The long-awaited debut memoir from the beloved New York Times critic, chronicling the convergence of parenthood and technology.

For more than a decade, Amanda Hess has documented the ways that social media and new technologies have upended our identities, living the contradictions of the internet even as she has tried to make sense of them. 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 screening 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 suddenly sucked her into the destabilizing world of the internet, and she was vulnerable—more than ever—to conspiracy, myth, judgment, commerce, and obsession.

As her relationship with the digital world escalates, Hess identifies these technologies as points of initiation into wider systems, with sometimes ancient histories, and sets out to illuminate how the American traditions of eugenics, surveillance, ableism 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 phantom traumas and seductive idols as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son’s young life and, in doing so, has constructed a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.

©2025 Amanda Hess (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Second Life is a tender, perceptive account of pregnancy and early motherhood—and a stylish confrontation with the demented landscape of digital parenting content. It also happens to be a subtle indictment of a healthcare system that leaves some parents scrolling for alternatives. Hess is a smart, savvy, and generous guide.” —Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley

“There is no better writer than Amanda Hess to dissect the joys, fears, and humiliations that accompany having children in the information age, and no wittier chaperone through the strange world of surveillance, monetization, bureaucracy, and alternative medicine to which pregnant people and mothers are subjected. Second Life is a sharp, moving, sometimes harrowing, and always funny companion to some of the best and worst things life has to offer.” —Max Read, editor of Read Max and former editor-in-chief of Gawker

“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