Second Life

Having a Child in the Digital Age

De: Amanda Hess

Duración: 9 h

Resumen del Editor

“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.

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.

©2025 Amanda Hess (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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