Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

The long-awaited debut memoir from the beloved New York Times critic, chronicling the convergence of parenthood and technology.

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.

Page by page, 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.