Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age (Doubleday, May) by Amanda Hess, a candid, incisive, and witty meditation on becoming a mother during this screen-based era that begins with the detection of an abnormality during an ultrasound as a catalyst to confront the multifaceted phenomenon of online life in America. Agent: Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency. Editor: Thomas Gebremedhin. First Lines: “I did not know that anything was unusual until I was seven months pregnant. This week your baby can cry, my pregnancy app said. Yes, in the uterus! I waited in the lobby of the prenatal imaging center, stroking my phone until I depleted its stock of inane facts.” (Author photo: Loreto Caceres)
I started taking notes early in my first pregnancy, not knowing they would become a book. I thought I might write a fun article about the absurd lengths that tech companies go to capture the attention of expectant mothers. Then when I was around seven months pregnant, I went in for what I anticipated to be a routine ultrasound. The doctor told me that he saw “something he didn’t like.” The month it took to diagnose the complication was among the worst of my life. And I was nagged by a superstitious feeling: that I had somehow brought risk upon my pregnancy by documenting it. I felt like I had been jinxed for prepackaging the experience as superficially funny. For treating it as content.
A few months later, after my son was born, I realized that this superstitious feeling was the topic I really needed to explore. I’m not a superstitious person. I’m not spiritual or religious. But pregnancy and early parenthood pushed me into an almost mystical headspace, and I realized that it was connected in some way to the technology I was using. I was gazing into my phone like it was an oracle that would reveal who my son would be and what kind of parent I would become. The whiplash of the pregnancy internet, between its ridiculous commodification and its terrifying existential prompts, began to suggest a shape.
I started to think of the internet as the shape-shifting antagonist of my story, one who speaks in many voices, and I plotted the narrative of my pregnancy against the rough beats of a genre thriller. I crafted a proposal with my agent, Jin Auh, that featured a long excerpt from the beginning of the book but a shaky idea of where it might go next. Thomas Gebremedhin at Doubleday offered to buy it in a preemptive offer, and we sold it in 2022, early in my second pregnancy. I started filing chapters to him one at a time. It was Thomas who helped me understand the role that analysis and reporting could play in the book and who encouraged me to zoom out further from my own life to chart an intellectual journey alongside the emotional one. Eventually I realized that these narrative tracks were more intimately connected than I first appreciated; I needed to grapple with the wider social and technological contexts to properly understand my experience.
Starting a book about pregnancy while pregnant a second time had its advantages. I was reacquainting myself with all the apps and gadgets I had used before, this time with an eye on the details. But I was also sick and tired, and soon I was once again terrified. That pregnancy was medically complex for a different reason, and I found that I was in no position to wisely process the confusion of my first pregnancy while muddling through the second one. I put the book down through most of that pregnancy and the first six months of my second child’s life—then picked it up again with an insatiable drive to write. I had spent so long in the wilds of pregnancy and infancy that when I staggered out, my brain felt desperate to reassert itself in the world of ideas.
A few months before I submitted my proposal to editors, I had a disagreement with my husband about how long we ought to wait before trying to get pregnant again. I remember telling him that I didn’t feel like we could have another kid until I figured out my book—which is so funny, because I did not “figure out my book” until I finished it several years later. I understand now that I was conflating the task of “figuring out my book” with “figuring out my life” and “figuring out how to be a parent to my kids.” But I had to have my kids before I could become a person capable of parenting them—and I had to write my book to know what it was about.
An excerpt from Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
Chapter 1
Cycle
Every month it came as a surprise. A fine morning lurched into a shaky afternoon. My boyfriend would irritate me in a way I could not articulate, and in response, I would reach back in my memory for some previous incident to twist into a complaint. In the evening, I might cry inexplicably while watching a British murder show, get a stomachache, and flop unhappily in bed until a sticky feeling bubbled between my legs. Still, the reality of the situation would not become clear to me until I saw the blood spattered in the toilet.
Right: my period. I could never keep track of when it had left and when it was due to return. Most of the time I tried not to think about having a body at all. It was too easy to remember that my insides were made of creepy interlocking ligaments and bones, like a skinned cadaver from Bodies: The Exhibition. Sometimes I would scroll past an inspirational quote on Instagram, like The body expresses what the mind suppresses, posted by a user calling herself @medicine_mami, and I would think, Shit. Should I do something about that? No! The suppression was working fine. I lay in bed at night, my rigid arms suspending the screen inches from my face, and disassociated into my phone. I reread the Wikipedia page for the missing Malaysian airplane. I watched a pore strip pull the blackheads from a Reddit user’s nose. Finally, I retreated to a meditation app, where a woman’s voice hissed commands at my muscles until I forgot that I existed.
And yet my period kept arriving unannounced, whining for my attention. Then one day I heard about an app that would track my cycle for me. Maybe I wouldn’t have to cultivate bodily awareness after all: I could just outsource it to my phone. The app was called Flo. She beckoned me from the App Store to download her and—as she put it—become an expert on you.
Flo was named after an old euphemism for menstruation and styled like my childhood diary. She was medicine-pink and stocked with digital stickers for illustrating the symptoms of my reproductive life. I could conjure a frowning rain cloud when I was angry and make tiny squiggles radiate from tiny underpants when my stomach hurt. She asked me to report my vaginal discharge and its consistency; she wanted to know when I had sex and how. I logged my cramps and feelings in her as if she could convert my PMS into a cool stream of data.
As Flo learned more about me, she began to not only predict my period dates but foretell the emotional contours of my days based on my expected hormone mix. Increased understanding of negative emotions is linked to the luteal phase, she told me on day twenty-one of my cycle, so this could be a good day to tackle thorny conversations with colleagues or managers.
I did not believe in Flo’s woo-woo prognostications, at least not enough to factor my luteal phase into my relationship with my boss. But I scanned her dispatches occasionally, whenever I felt like pulling the handle on her animatronic fortune-teller machine and receiving a weird menstruation-themed prophecy. When I read an article in The Wall Street Journal accusing Flo of sharing sensitive user data with Facebook (a claim Flo denied), I didn’t delete the app. Online advertisers already profited off the assumption that I hated myself, I reasoned. Would it really make a difference if they found out exactly when I hated myself the most? I kept Flo in my pocket, checking in with her every couple of weeks. I even consulted her as I selected the date that I would marry my boyfriend Marc, making sure it fell during a week of emotional stability and minimal bloating.
As Flo shepherded me through my cycles, I became, almost against my will, highly aware of my capacity to become pregnant. When I had downloaded Flo to predict my periods, I hadn’t been thinking of the app’s other, obvious use case: it is a fertility-tracking assistant. Deep in its App Store sales pitch, Flo’s language of data-driven self-discovery flowered into a homily on childbearing. Discover a personal journey to motherhood with Flo, it said. Get pregnant as soon as naturally possible for you. Flo made conception feel like an appealingly dull video game.
Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from Second Life by Amanda Hess, read by the author. © Amanda Hess ℗ 2025 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.
