Second Life Audiobook By Amanda Hess cover art

Second Life

Having a Child in the Digital Age

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Second Life

By: Amanda Hess
Narrated by: Amanda Hess
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“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.©2025 Amanda Hess (P)2025 Random House Audio Editors Select History & Culture Motherhood Parenting & Families Popular Culture Relationships Social Sciences Technology & Society Funny

Critic reviews

One of Time Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“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

Editorial Review

She walked so we could run ... away
You could say I’ve been a tad obsessed with parenting memoirs since becoming a parent myself, and few have spoken truer to me than Amanda Hess’s, in which she documents her pregnancy to parenthood journey in a chronically connected world. This isn’t a how-to guide disguised as memoir, to be clear. I’d call it more of a commiseration guide for anyone who religiously tracked their cycle in an app, spent restless nights googling whether their sleeping newborn’s grunts were normal, or found themselves in a niche parenting rabbit hole out of sheer morbid curiosity. No, it’s not just you, she seems to reassure with each chapter. It’s the system. Hess narrates, and her delivery is warm and intimate while also capturing the subtle humor and absurdity of this whole experience of parenting (and performing parenting) online. You may still feel tempted to move to an off-the-grid cabin in the woods after listening, but at least you’ll know you’re not alone.—Sam D., Audible Editor

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The author touched on many aspects of our society's current views and ways of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting. Compared to what I relied on for information and guidance during my childbirth years in the 1980s, the author's experience approaches what I might have considered science fiction in my time.

Important documentation of one woman's honesty

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Important insights on modern patenting. I wish every mother could read this book. Beautifully written

Every mother should read this book

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