Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

"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.

Author: Amanda Hess
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 05/06/2025
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.84w x 1.15d
ISBN: 9780385549738


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2025
Publishers Weekly 03/17/2025
Booklist 04/01/2025 pg. 11
BookPage 05/01/2025

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.