Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

“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.