How I Wrote This Book: Amanda Hess’s Second Life

“The idea of optimizing motherhood—those are new words that we're using for it, but the ideology of that is so old and disgusting…”

For the latest installment of “How I Wrote This Book,” a Deez Links Q&A series on craft and creativity, we have the brilliant Amanda Hess talking about her debut memoir, Second Life: Having A Child In the Digital Age.

You’ll recognize Amanda as the New York Times critic-at-large covering culture, especially of the online variety (though one of my personal favorites is still this interactive on Meryl Streep’s one weird trick). But real heads have been following Amanda ever since her wunderkind blogger days at Slate and know that there’s no one better to usher us all into the next generation of digital discourse around parenting and selfhood, which is what she does in her book.

You can read excerpts over at the NYT Magazine and Marie Claire, but what you REALLY gotta see are the iconic “momfluencer” videos that she’s been making to promote the book in a very hilarious meta way. (Let’s just say Nara Smith has been real quiet lately…) Last week, we got on the phone last week to discuss how the book came together; here’s our conversation about how Amanda Hess wrote Second Life.

Spotted: local influential mother making a book from scratch….

Do you remember when you started thinking about writing this book?

I had this idea that I wanted to write a nonfiction book where technology took the form of a character that speaks in different voices—a book where technology plays as big of a role on the page as it did in my own mind. But I wasn't sure what I wanted to focus it on. And then when I got pregnant in 2020, I found it to be such a confusing time, where I was just constantly on my phone.

I started to take notes and screenshots of what I was seeing, and I started to write thoughts to myself. I have a special email that I only use for writing myself emails. Later, the pregnancy became complicated, and I remember having this feeling of superstition about taking notes about my pregnancy—that I had exhibited this hubris, and I was being punished or something like that. It was not a rational feeling, but I stopped writing the book.