Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda Hess (5/6/25)

**PREORDER TODAY - ON SALE - MAY 6, 2025**

In her dazzling debut, star New York Times reporter Amanda Hess examines motherhood through the distorted lens of technology, reckoning with the tyranny of fertility apps and her own "digital identity crisis."

"The interloper in my pregnancy was technology." Deftly moving between memoir, criticism, and cultural history, Hess lampoons the predictive advertising that targets expectant mothers and reports on fertility trackers and luxury maternity fashion retailers whose jarring weekly newsletters vacillate between encouragement and judgement. She interrogates her reticence and eventual excitement at the idea of getting pregnant, analyzing her relationship to her body in contrast to a decades-long affair with the disembodied Internet. And finally, she confronts the massive panic induced when an ultrasound reveals an abnormality in her baby's development. A veteran reporter on Internet culture, Hess lays bare her online coming-of-age while processing her experiences as a mother under the influence of pervasive, ever shifting technology. She watches AI encroach on film, TV, and literature to period-tracking apps, millennial maternity brands, and robotic bassinets. Her eager search for "real life" motivates her to join message boards and new mothers' groups seeking to parse the chorus of voices crowding in on pregnancy. Hess asks, How can we hope to shape an identity in an era where the margins between the artificial and the real are rapidly narrowing? How much damage is done when one is forced to blindly accept guidance driven by the machinery of consumerism? In a voice at once hilarious and poignant, Hess probes the anxiety of motherhood for those whose childhoods unfurled online, attempting to make sense of the conflicting signals that continue to confound our experience.