Second life

Second life Having a child in the digital age

Amanda Hess

Book - 2025

""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"--

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2nd Floor New Shelf 306.8743/Hess (NEW SHELF) Due Sep 10, 2025
Subjects
Hess, Amanda > (Journalist)
Motherhood.
Internet > Social aspects.
Information society.
maternity.
Autobiographies.
Genres
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Doubleday [2025]
Language
English
Main Author
Amanda Hess (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
257 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-257).
ISBN
9780385549738
  • Preface: Alma
  • Introduction: Confrontation
  • Cycle
  • Bump
  • Life
  • Risk
  • Nature
  • Birth
  • Interlude: "Alma"
  • Work
  • Gear
  • Growth
  • Judgment
  • Free.
Review by Booklist Review

A New York Times correspondent on internet culture, Hess turns her focus inward with this candid story of how her overuse of digital media greatly influenced her journey through pregnancy and childbirth. Before conception was confirmed, the author reports being besieged with targeted marketing that gamified this highly personal endeavor. Hess asserts that the pervasiveness of externally driven, curated content encourages compulsive use, supports rumination, and invites demoralizing comparisons. She adds that extensive testing leading to inconclusive results compels parents to seek unsubstantiated internet information. Rather than providing reassurance and clarity, she asserts, the abundance of content deepens and expands anxiety. Stylized, alluring depictions of motherhood that proliferated during the pandemic capitalized on this emotionally fraught time. After birth, the messaging Hess received focused on the promotion of parental "pacifiers," products that sought to replace community support and pathologize normal behavior and development. Hess' experiences would be most useful as a cautionary tale for new parents, especially those with high-risk pregnancies, whose insecurities provide fertile ground for online profiteers seeking to exploit them.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Cultural critic Hess's fierce and funny debut memoir is an astute document of pregnancy and parenting in the internet era. At the start of her pregnancy in 2020, Hess was wryly amused by the way targeted ads clumsily urged her to buy maternity clothes and quackish health supplements. Then a prenatal test informed her that her baby had Beckwith-Weidemann Syndrome, a growth disorder that increases risks of childhood cancers. Suddenly, her relationship to the internet shifted, her phone "feed me from its bank of dark materials" as she tried to search her way to safety. Overwhelmed by a plethora of "experts," from free birthers to "medical mom" influencers who display their disabled children's vulnerable bodies online, Hess gradually came to agree with child psychologist Alison Gopnik: no number of parenting "hacks" can sculpt the perfect child nor substitute for a healthy society. Bringing journalistic scruples to her explorations of eugenics, disability advocacy, and the algorithmic churn of life in the 2020s, Hess balances her own story with a broader portrait of the anxious buzz of the modern world. Parents will feel especially seen by this incisive and refreshing account. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (May)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A panoramic query into how pregnancy, birth, and motherhood have been reshaped by technology and social media. At seven months pregnant, Hess spent an hour on an ultrasound table that became "the moment that [her] relationship with technology turned." Her first book traces the events leading up to that moment, and then the days, weeks, and years that followed, chronicling not only her personal experience but the many--sometimes unsettling--ways that it intersects with technology. Technology, for Hess, is a behemoth, including everything from common medical equipment to menstruation-tracking phone apps to the "motherhood internet" (and its anti-natalist mirror). Each twist or milestone in the author's story has a touchpoint with either diagnostic machinery, anonymous online message boards, data collection, or social media influencer accounts; each of those intersecting items has a history, context, and agenda related to the ideals and tensions of womanhood and society itself. Having reported on the nuances and phenomena of internet culture for theNew York Times and other publications, Hess brings to her subject humility, curiosity, and a sly, self-aware wit rooted partially in her own adoption of online life. She investigates both seemingly harmless, ubiquitous advances and more fringe online movements and characters with an open thoroughness that renders her trustworthy. Her sweeping and incisive research, paired with her personal vulnerability, reveals a series of slippery slopes and potential (and existing) ethical quagmires from which no prong of technology is entirely exempt. With her distinct perspective evolving in real time, she shares a fresh and complicated take on how the particular conditions of pregnancy and motherhood stretch and thin the lines that technologies, companies, and communities walk between informing and advertising, between monitoring and surveilling, and between sharing and judging. A captivating, charged, and crucially provocative consideration of motherhood in modern America. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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