Second Life

By: Amanda Hess

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

'Unexpected, intellectually rigorous, funny, beautiful; a profoundly talented writer' Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

In the summer of 2020, when Amanda Hess was pregnant for the first time, a routine ultrasound screening detected a mysterious abnormality in her baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers online. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search unleashed a destabilizing onslaught of data and technology, and she was vulnerable - more than ever - to conspiracy, myth, judgement, commerce and obsession.

In Second Life, Hess tells her deeply personal story of a pregnancy that falls outside the fêted category of 'normal'. But this is also a story about all of us. For as she made her way through a bizarre digital world of pregnancy apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, 'freebirth' influencers and hospital reality shows, Hess realised that ideas of eugenics, surveillance, ableism and hyper-individualism are being sold through shiny technologies to a new generation of parents.

At once funny, surreal and heartbreaking, Second Life asks compelling questions about how our most fundamental human experiences are fractured and reshaped by technology.

©2025 Amanda Hess (P)2025 Hachette Audio UK

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)

Second Life is indispensable ... frank, funny, searingly smart. A must read for anyone who has ever wondered what it means to parent in the digital age and an essential antidote for the information-overload they'll certainly be met with on the internet (Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica)

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)

New parents spend countless hours staring at our phones, scrolling for the comfort American systems fail to provide us. But pushed to the brink, only Amanda Hess could step through the blue light looking glass - journey through her specific, and our collective, anxiety, dissociation, data points, targeted ads, and apps - and emerge a more sensate, embodied, and sharper critic. The honesty of Second Life takes my breath away (Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor and Like a Mother)

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 funny - 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)