One of the Washington Post‘s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2025
A Most Anticipated Book of 2025: Vulture • Lit Hub • The Los Angeles Times • TIME
“Engrossing…With a reporter’s gimlet eye, Hess lenses out from her personal experience…[She] has a (hilariously reluctant) native’s ear for the (awful) millennial marketing sound.” —The New York Times
“Second Life is not mainly a medical odyssey but, rather, a mordant contemplation of the many screens…that reflected and mediated Hess’s experience of pregnancy and early motherhood….[It] is foremost a mash note to Hess’s firstborn son…the book’s charisma is rooted in its mood of droll astonishment….Despite the oracular hubris of the genetic-screening vanguard, the story a parent wants has only one primary source, one reliable narrator. You have to wait for him.” —Jessica Winter, The New Yorker
“Hess trains her critic’s eye on her own life, probing both the effect of the internet on maternal guilt and anxiety (a nearly universal condition) and the more specific challenges of her own motherhood journey.…Smart, funny, and filled with love.”
—The Boston Globe
“With wit, discernment and candor…[Hess] captures the anxiety and weirdness of reproduction in our modern screen-based, app-oriented culture.…Insightful…very funny.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Exceptional. . . .Impeccably blends tech skepticism, cultural criticism and memoir. . . .Hess is a savvy, charmingly acerbic analyst. . . .[She] writes with a calm, uncloying sympathy for anyone eager to allay their concerns by discovering more about their offspring. . . .[A] book about knowing, [with] striking, beautiful moments.” —The Washington Post
“Spot-on and brutally funny….Hess smartly paints herself as just another willing victim of the internet, a contradiction that speaks to how so many people view their online habits.” —The Atlantic
“A smart, well-observed memoir. . . .Clear-eyed. . . .It could have been easy to dunk on the dystopia of it all, but Hess avoids that easy path, staying in the muddled middle where most of us live.” —The New Republic
“With an investigative eye and a sense of humor (tempered by an appropriate amount of alarm), Hess. . . probe[s] the larger phenomena influencing the act (and industry) of reproduction. . . .Second Life is not only a book for parents; it’s for anyone intrigued (and concerned) by the ways in which our digital footprints impact the circle of life itself.” —Elle
“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
“[Hess] connects her experiences to excellent research.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Second Life isn’t the new What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Hess isn’t offering parenting tips to tech-savvy caretakers. Instead, she takes readers on an eye-opening adventure down the parenting internet rabbit hole.” —TIME
“A truly amazing book.” —Liana Finck, illustrator and author of Passing for Human
“Second Life is…a powerful firsthand account of how digital cultures are distorting and radicalizing parental decision making.” —Science Magazine
“Second Life is the best account of the perinatal period since Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions (1993), sounding out the tender and weird ways in which we create our own user’s manual for parenthood.” —The Observer
“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
“Second Life is a treat….Hess takes us on fascinating detours into the history of fetal imaging…feminism’s flirtation with eugenics, and the origins of what we now think of as ‘natural childbirth’….A tender and often very funny memoir….Hess is a generous thinker, even when she’s up against ideologies that repel her.” —The Cut
“There is no better chaperone than Amanda Hess through the strange world of surveillance, monetization, bureaucracy, and alternative medicine to which pregnant people and mothers are subjected.”
—Max Read, editor of Read Max and former editor-in-chief of Gawker
“Only Amanda Hess could step through the blue light looking glass of our phones and explore her specific—and our collective—anxiety, dissociation, data points, targeted ads, and apps; she emerges a more sensate, embodied, and sharper critic. The honesty of Second Life took my breath away.”
—Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor and Like a Mother
“Second Life is an incredibly urgent and moving investigation into the business of pregnancy and motherhood in our divided, digital age…Occasionally harrowing, frequently hilarious, and deeply original.”
—Thomas Page McBee, Lambda award-winning author of Amateur and Man Alive
“Finally, a book about parenthood that acknowledges that the internet is the first place we go to navigate pregnancy. Hess doesn’t demonize or valorize it but rather serves as a smart—and very amusing—guide to the good, the bad, and the truly weird of how we give birth today.”
—Marisa Meltzer, author of the New York Times bestselling Glossy
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