βHessβs 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.β βVulture
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 Hessβs 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 vulnerableβmore than everβto 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, βfreebirthβ influencers, and hospital reality shows. Hess confronts technologyβs distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her sonβs 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.
A Most Anticipated Book of 2025: Vulture β’ Lit Hub β’ The Los Angeles Times β’ TIME
βEngrossingβ¦With a reporterβs gimlet eye, Hess lenses out from her personal experienceβ¦[She] has a (hilariously reluctant) nativeβs ear for the (awful) millennial marketing sound.β βThe New York Times
βSecond Life is not mainly a medical odyssey but, rather, a mordant contemplation of the many screensβ¦that reflected and mediated Hessβs experience of pregnancy and early motherhoodβ¦.[It] is foremost a mash note to Hessβs firstborn sonβ¦the bookβs charisma is rooted in its mood of droll astonishmentβ¦.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.β βJessica Winter, The New Yorker
βHess trains her criticβs 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.β¦Smart, funny, and filled with love.β
βThe Boston Globe
βWith wit, discernment and candorβ¦[Hess] captures the anxiety and weirdness of reproduction in our modern screen-based, app-oriented culture.β¦Insightfulβ¦very funny.β βThe Wall Street Journal
βExceptional. . . .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.β βThe Washington Post
βSpot-on and brutally funnyβ¦.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.β βThe Atlantic
βA 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.β βThe New Republic
βWith 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.β βElle
βHessβs 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.β
βVulture
β[Hess] connects her experiences to excellent research.β βThe Los Angeles Times
βSecond Life isnβt the new What to Expect When Youβre Expecting. Hess isnβt offering parenting tips to tech-savvy caretakers. Instead, she takes readers on an eye-opening adventure down the parenting internet rabbit hole.β βTIME
βA truly amazing book.β βLiana Finck, illustrator and author of Passing for Human
βSecond Life isβ¦a powerful firsthand account of how digital cultures are distorting and radicalizing parental decision making.β βScience Magazine
βSecond 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.β βThe Observer
βHess 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.β
βKirkus Reviews (starred review)
β[A] fierce and funny debut memoir. . . .An astute document of pregnancy and parenting in the internet era. . . .Incisive and refreshing.β βPublishers Weekly (starred review)
βThe story of a crisis-born odyssey, Second Life charts a new motherβs descent into and re-emergence from the internetβs βpregnant underworldβ 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 weβre all up against, and an engine of Amanda Hessβs bracing and eloquent memoir.β
βMichelle Orange, author of Pure Flame
βAmanda 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.β
βClaire Dederer, bestselling author of Monsters: A Fanβs Dilemma
βSecond Life is a treatβ¦.Hess takes us on fascinating detours into the history of fetal imagingβ¦feminismβs flirtation with eugenics, and the origins of what we now think of as βnatural childbirthββ¦.A tender and often very funny memoirβ¦.Hess is a generous thinker, even when sheβs up against ideologies that repel her.β βThe Cut
βThere 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.β
βMax Read, editor of Read Max and former editor-in-chief of Gawker
βOnly Amanda Hess could step through the blue light looking glass of our phones and explore her specificβand our collectiveβanxiety, 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.β
βAngela Garbes, author of Essential Labor and Like a Mother
βSecond Life is an incredibly urgent and moving investigation into the business of pregnancy and motherhood in our divided, digital ageβ¦Occasionally harrowing, frequently hilarious, and deeply original.β
βThomas Page McBee, Lambda award-winning author of Amateur and Man Alive
βFinally, 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 smartβand very amusingβguide to the good, the bad, and the truly weird of how we give birth today.β
βMarisa Meltzer, author of the New York Times bestselling Glossy
AMANDA HESS is a critic at large for The New York Times. She writes about internet and pop culture for the Arts section and conΒtributes regularly to The New York Times MagaΒzine. Hess has worked as an internet columnist for Slate magazine, an editor at Good magazine, and an arts and nightlife columnist at the WashΒington 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.
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