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Having a Child in the Digital Age
by Amanda Hess
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.
"Hess 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." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] fierce and funny debut memoir...An astute document of pregnancy and parenting in the internet era...Incisive and refreshing." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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
"Amanda 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." —Claire Dederer, bestselling author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
This information about Second Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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