What to Expect Online When You're Expecting (with Amanda Hess)

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Intro - 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes. We're mapping the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other so we can build a more just world. I'm journalist Blair Hodges, and our guide in this episode is New York Times critic-at-large Amanda Hess.

AMANDA HESS: At first, when I did have a normal pregnancy, it seemed like these apps and influencers knew so much about me. That we shared so much, and they had this intimate insight into what was going on with me. And then the minute my pregnancy was revealed as abnormal in fact, it was as if they had nothing to sell me anymore.

BLAIR HODGES: When Amanda Hess got pregnant, the internet seemed to know before anyone else. And she kind of loved that. Suddenly her feeds were filled with baby gear, momfluencers, and parenting advice curated just for her. But when her pregnancy took a complicated turn, a darker side of the digital world began to emerge.

Her new book explores what happens when our most intimate experiences collide with the cold logic of algorithms steering us toward conspiracies and unsettling ideologies from eugenics to hyper individualism and beyond. The book is called Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. It's funny and heartbreaking and bizarre, and Amanda Hess joins us to talk about it right now.

 

Abnormal Ultrasound – 01:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: Amanda Hess, welcome to Relationscapes.

AMANDA HESS: Thank you so much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: When you were seven months pregnant, you were two months away from the expected delivery of your first baby and your ultrasound went way longer than ultrasounds typically go. You started to get a feeling that something might be up. And the technician, like techs always do, is very vague about what's happening.

They're waiting for the doctor to come in, and worry starts to take over. And in this moment, you write, “I missed my phone.”

Your phone, just across the room, could be a portal to some kind of help. I thought it would be great to have you read from your introduction to take us right inside the room with you. This is on page eight.

AMANDA HESS: Sure. Okay, here we go.

My phone sat on an empty chair six feet away, smothered beneath my smug maternity dress. It blinked silently with text messages from Mark. If I had the phone, I could hold it close to the exam table and Google my way out. I could pour my fears into its portal and process them into answers.

I could consult the pregnant women who came before me, dust off their old message board posts and read of long-ago ultrasounds that found weird ears and stuck out tongues. They had dropped their babies’ fates into the internet like coins into a fountain, and I would scrounge through them all, looking for the lucky penny for the woman who returned to say it turned out to be nothing.

Trick of the light. It was ludicrous, but in my panic it felt incontrovertible. If I searched it smart and fast enough, the internet would save us. I had constructed my life through its screens, mapped the world along its circuits. Now I would make a second life there, too. As I write this four years later, I see my hour on the table as the moment that my relationship with technology turned, its shadow shifting around me.

I reached for a sense of control and gripped tightly to my phone. It would not give me the answers I was looking for, but it would feed me wrong answers from its endless supply. It would serve me facts and conspiracies, gadgets and idols, judgments and tips. The baby tapped at my stomach. I rubbed my hand against it, returning the signal.

The technician handed me a spray of paper towels and left me alone in the room. I heaved myself up and faced the exit. My stomach hung over the table's edge, waiting for the door to open.

BLAIR HODGES: This is a great window into what we're going to see in this book about your relationship to becoming a parent, what pregnancy was like, what having a kid is like, and then how reliant a lot of people have become, myself included, on the internet. When you have questions, you knew you could go there. You say it could feed you “facts, conspiracies, gadgets, idols, judgments, and tips.”

To me, that's sort of an overview of the whole book. As we'll talk about, you're looking for facts on the internet, but there's also plenty of conspiracies. There's gadgets, there's stuff for sale. There's idols, influencers, and other people we kind of look to as exemplars or to learn from.

Plenty of judgments if you're in internet forums where people are going to call into question whatever you do, regardless of what you do. And also little tips where you might see an Instagram reel to help you stop a tantrum.

So are you thinking about that phone in that ultrasound room? How much of this is really an impulse you had in that moment where you're really thinking about, gosh, I can't wait, I gotta figure this out.

AMANDA HESS: The part where I wished I had my phone. It was like a constant loop in my mind as I was in there. The parts where I was like, it's only going to give me wrong answers. Like, that came later, after, you know, a few years later. But I think, you know, even now, like, I still.

I turn to my phone when I'm ashamed, when I'm confused, when there's something that I don't even want to say out loud because it becomes too real. And so it's this place where I can act out things in my mind, and it becomes like a step in my obsessive loop.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you feel addicted to your phone?

AMANDA HESS: I used to smoke cigarettes, and I was addicted to cigarettes. Like, if I didn't smoke a cigarette, I would feel really physically bad. I would be spinning out. Whereas, now, if I don't use my phone for a while, I feel good. But in this case, yeah, it was as if, like, I needed the cigarette of my phone and, like.

Yeah. So I don't know if I. I don't usually think of it as an addiction. Yeah, it's something that I wish played a smaller role in my life.

 

When Amanda Didn’t Want Kids – 6:52

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I'm glad you actually pointed that out, because maybe we overuse the addiction metaphor for that, and maybe phone use can be compulsive or unhealthy, but there are real addictions. And, yeah, I think that's good to kind of point out that happens on a different level. I want to get back to the ultrasound, but first, I'd like to say if anybody had followed your journalistic career up to this point, they might be surprised to find that you're having a child at all, let alone publishing a book on having children.

Right. Because Mark, your partner, found this blast from your past. At one point, he's like, hey, look at this old article I found where you say you’re proudly opting out of having kids.

AMANDA HESS: I had totally blocked this out, but at some point, Mark, my husband, sent me this story that I'd written a couple of months before I met him. And it was all about how, for me, and I was just wildly speculating about a larger sort of group, a trend among my generation. I was deciding not to have kids, and I was doing it to be able to focus on my career and to be able to, I think I put it, “have some luxuries.”

And then, you know, a few years later, I was starting to try to get pregnant. And I think, you know, there are so many people who say they don't want to have kids and then they don't.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AMANDA HESS: Like, that is for sure something that happens quite frequently for me. I can see, reading back through that story, that there were things that I wasn't saying. And the thing that I would say to people if I were talking to them privately is I might want to have kids someday, but I would really have to find just like the perfect situation where I had a partner who was really gonna be like an equal partner.

And as I was saying this, I was living in LA and casually dating people, and I was like, that person literally does not exist and I will never find them, so I'm not gonna have kids. And so I'm gonna sort of turn it into something that's good for me. And then I met Mark, and he actually truly is that person where it's almost like my husband does so much, especially as I was writing this book.

He's actually out of town right now, and so I have to do everything and I'm like, oh, my God, there's stuff that you just don't even notice that your partner does.

BLAIR HODGES: He comes off better than any partner of any of the books. I've read a lot of these books. Right. For this show. He comes off better than pretty much any of the partners of these authors that I'm reading.

AMANDA HESS: I mean. Yeah, I mean, part of it is, he's not saying he's perfect. Yeah. I describe him at some point in the book as a non player character. And I did that before right wing people started using that a lot. I was just using it like it's from its video game origins.

But he's not a huge character in the book. But I do think, one of the greatest gifts that he's given me is that beyond just doing all of this work for us and for our kids, I don't have to think about that particular line of inquiry, what would my life be like if my husband did stuff?

Which is so just such a phenomenon, I think, for so many women who are partnered with men. And so, creatively, I just don't have to deal with that.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. It's funny to hear you say he's not a huge character because the absence of the complaints or the absence of those burdens that would be put on you to me, made him stand out in that sense, I think, because I've read a lot of these books. Right. So you're not talking a lot about having to do everything, having to be the manager of the Home completely and being the only one that's dealing directly with the childcare and all of this.

So I think his absence spoke so loudly to me and he pops up here and there. But because you were able to focus on some of these other issues and other episodes will kind of talk about the mental load and all the kind of things that women are more likely to be carrying.

But it was refreshing to have a book where I could set that to the side for a minute and focus on some of these other things that you bring up.

AMANDA HESS: I mean, it also becomes something that I grapple with in the book because eventually when my son is born, he's diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder. And then I talk about this sort of kind of mother that I'm slotted into when that happens, which is the medical mom. And the medical mom is assumed to be the one who knows all of the doctors names and is doing all of the research about the condition and is bringing the kid to the appointments and perhaps like posting it on social media too.

BLAIR HODGES: And maybe going as far as to advocate for the child more.

AMANDA HESS: Right, right, right. And it really like it can become her entire identity. And Mark is just way better at organizational stuff and so he really takes a lot of the mental load off of us.

 

An App Called Flo – 11:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it was nice to read. Good for you, Mark. But let's go back to the book here where you talk about an app called Flo. So this is an app you originally downloaded to track your period. And you say the app didn't necessarily make you want to have kids, but it definitely sharpened your imagination about how that could go down.

So now that you're with a partner and you have Mark, maybe you're more open to the idea of you can see becoming a parent and then what's Flo doing to get involved in the mix here? Flo is a character herself.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. So I started using Flo just to track my periods, just to know when they were coming. Because I would get very angry and sad like a day before it happened. So weird! [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: And I loved how you say like, you have it every month, but every month it shocks you, like “what is happening?”

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, no, exactly. It felt that way. So just being able to anticipate that and I'm probably especially angry because my hormones are a little weird right now was very helpful. But it was really something that I needed to use. Once a month I would just put in when my period was coming and then it could tell me when it was going to come again.

But as I Used it. It started to make me aware. You know, it always wants you to be more engaged in the app. Like, no app wants you to use it once a month. Like, that's not a great business proposition.

BLAIR HODGES: Business model. Yeah.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. So it just tells you all this information about, like, your luteal phase and stuff and what the different hormone mix is supposed to make certain parts of your life easier or harder. And it also lets you know when you're at your most fertile and when you're at your least fertile during this cycle.

And so it just made me, before I had started using it, I had literally, I couldn't tell you when, you know, in a cycle you were supposed to try to have sex to try to get pregnant. I had no idea. And so it was the first sort of time that I really started to think about that.

And then once that happened, it's not like, should we have kids one day? It's like, what if we had sex right now? You know what I mean? And we produced a child immediately. So it did just really sharpen my imagination in a certain direction.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. The book points out how tech and apps and stuff are leading to this “quantified self” movement that we can hack. It's like biohacking, optimizing our health with science and tech. And I don't know, does it make sex feel more transactional if you're trying to have a kid? I mean, I kind of experienced that when we were trying to have our kids, but we were using, like, ovulation tests and other stuff we didn't have.

We weren't using any apps. This is a little bit more than a decade ago. So did it make the process feel more mechanical to you?

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I mean, there's one thing. You know, this is not like the only way to create a child, but there's one thing that has to happen.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AMANDA HESS: For it to be effective as a technique. So you're really focused on that occurring. But more than that, I think it was just something that was always in my pocket now. So at any time of the month, I was just sort of becoming aware of it. And it had this calendar that you could sort of swipe forward to, you know, and I was starting to near my 35th birthday, which is when doctors start to code your pregnancy as geriatric for reasons that I don't entirely understand exactly why that's the cutoff date.

But it is the perfect word for that. It's a number that started to loom for me. And I just became aware of time as, you know, the biological clock. Yes. Not in terms of, I have a story that's due in a couple of weeks, but, this egg's coming then, you know, which I never thought about my body that way before, and that falls more on the shoulders of women.

BLAIR HODGES: I have other episodes where we'll talk about how men should be considering this as well, that sperm health changes over people's lives. And the older a man is that, that's a consideration anyway. It's just interesting that you had an app for it. Mark probably didn't have an app about, like, how his sperm health was.

AMANDA HESS: Right. Although I'm sure they're working on it. Like, you know, it's like they'll just. They're going to cover everything at a certain point.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. You mentioned how it was sort of on all the time that, you know, we used to have books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting. You could have that book and then set it down, but you have something bigger than that book in your pocket all the time. And you say one of the sickest things is you just ignored all of Flo's advice as well.

So after you got pregnant and Flo told you, okay, it made a little fetus baby kind of thing on your phone you could watch, then you're not doing its advice either.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I mean, I guess I wanted to make clear that that's not what I was in it for. And I didn't need Flo to tell me how to do certain things. Like, Flo definitely had more specific advice for the types of food that it wanted me to eat based on the week and the trimester.

And I completely ignored that. Cause I was just like, I can handle just trying to eat more leafy greens throughout, but I'm not gonna modulate things by the week.

BLAIR HODGES: I thought it was spinach in first trimester, arugula in the second trimester, something.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I have no idea. But it was more like, you know, because I can sort of be like, well, that doesn't sound like a big deal. You know, it was as if I was checking it to make sure that I was on the level pretty much.

You know what I mean? That I was assuring myself that there wasn't something super important that I was forgetting to do.

 

The Targeted Ads Begin – 17:39

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so Flo's with you all along, and you talk about how Flo knew before pretty much anybody else did. You and the internet knew you were pregnant before anybody else. You had told your partner, Mark. But people usually wait a while to tell others they're pregnant in case of pregnancy loss.

You say it only took 48 hours for the brands to find you! Let's talk about targeted ads and how you started experiencing those really early on.

AMANDA HESS: Some of the earliest screenshots that I took for this book, I started to do a lot of memory preservation and note taking through, like, taking screenshots and then starting to annotate them. And some of my earliest screenshots are of these first ads that I got after I logged my pregnancy into Flo.

And I started to search the internet for the most obvious, like, “I'm pregnant,” you know, “what do I do” search terms. And it really started right away, and it was like, you know, you shouldn't be using those drugstore prenatal vitamins. Here's a much more expensive one that you should order online. And just these incredibly idealized images of pregnant women and mothers just immediately started flooding my phone.

There was so much about this process that surprised me, but one of the things that surprised me the most was that these ads really affected me on an emotional level where, I know what advertising is, I know what it's trying to do. And for whatever reason, I think because I was so unprepared to be pregnant and I wanted to do everything right, but I had no idea what that means.

Like, pregnancy felt so much like a thing that was happening to me as opposed to an active thing to do. I think just being inundated with these images that really have nothing to do with anything other than these sort of women being thin and beautiful.

BLAIR HODGES: And mostly white, you point out, too.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I really internalized that, I think. And even if I didn't want to or feel like I could look exactly like them, there was a drumbeat to all of this information that was like, you need to think about being pregnant all the time. You should present as a healthy pregnant woman or whatever.

And it started to just feel like my body was a public concern, like my pregnancy was nothing.

BLAIR HODGES: People start commenting on it, too. In public.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. Right. Yes. Once my bump. I hate that word. What else do you call it?

BLAIR HODGES: Um, my lovely lady lump? [laughter]

AMANDA HESS: Once my stomach was larger, people started to comment on it. And again, I was surprised that I got a lot of affirmation from that, where I was like, yeah, you're right. I am pregnant.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AMANDA HESS: I'm doing it.

BLAIR HODGES: People would call you “mama” and stuff. You're like, “oh! I don't know you, but,” you know.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, yeah. This was also during the beginning, the early days of COVID And so I was like, “a person's talking to me. That feels good.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. You know, but you also talk about a little bit feeling a little bit like an imposter in the sense of you didn't get this huge rush of a feeling of, like, I'm being a mother now. This is motherly. Like, it sounded like the pregnancy felt a little alien to you, that it wasn't comfortable, that it wasn't.

Didn't feel the kind of natural thing that people might expect, and they think this is just a natural thing that women do.

AMANDA HESS: Mm. Yeah. It definitely felt like the weirdest thing I had ever done. I mean, there's a person inside of your body. That's—I don't know, obviously, it's been happening for many years now to a lot of people, and it's how people are generated. But even now, I'm like, that's crazy. Like, that happened.

BLAIR HODGES: It was refreshing to read this because my wife felt very similar to kind of how you did. And a lot of the pregnancy books I read tend to more often go into the Just celebration of it and the empowerment and the feeling of creation. I don't see as much of this. Like, this feels confusing and weird and alien to me.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. And I think that was part of my fascination with just the pregnant internet, where I was like, who are these women who feel just so at ease being pregnant? And why. And what does that mean? And why don't I feel that way? Yeah. It was like, I hated being pregnant.

Like, I think I love my kids so much, and also, the number one thing that is stopping me from having more kids is, I refuse to be pregnant again. I just, I won't do it.

 

Shame and Self-Blame – 22:29

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you incurred some trauma, too. I want to talk about that. Back in the ultrasound room again, the doctor finally came in and told you that he saw something he didn't. Like, he suspected Beckwith-Weidman syndrome. Is that how you pronounce Weidman?

AMANDA HESS: Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome.

BLAIR HODGES: “Why-de-men”. Okay, thank you. And you asked him to write it down. You were in there alone, because, again, this was sort of during COVID so Mark couldn't be there with you. You're in the room with the doctor, and you're starting to go into a daze. And you just say, “can you write that down?”

And he says, “Don't Google it.” Which, of course, is basically the first thing you did after you told Mark.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I mean, of course I was going to do that, but I understand now why he said that. It's because when you Google something like that, the images that you get back are, at times alarming. And the information that you get is not necessarily up to date, especially for a condition that is rare like that one.

I think it's something like between one and 12,000 or one in 20,000 births of a child who has Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome. The medical consensus on it is changing all of the time. So when you Google it, you might find, you know, I was immediately going to medical journals to try to read about what this was and what the range of outcomes were.

And something that was published 10 years ago is really different from something that is published today.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And the way they detected it with your son, wasn't it because the tongue looked large? And so it was like, okay, an enlargement of different organs, like the tongue is a symptom of this?

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an overgrowth disorder that causes the overgrowth of certain parts of the body. And most kids with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome have macroglossia, which is a large chunk. Some kids don't. They'll have enlargements in different parts. But it's a pretty significant tell for an ultrasound doctor.

BLAIR HODGES: You found a phrase in one of these medical journals, a diagnostic odyssey, this sort of quest to figure out what is wrong and what might have caused it and all the different tests to diagnose it, and you're trying to figure out your share of maybe blame in it. There's a quote here where you say at one point, you say, I thrashed and sobbed in bed one afternoon, acting like a dying animal.

I should have become a better person before making a copy of me. What's it like writing about that? I mean, you. You laugh a little bit now, and in that moment, are you thinking, I might have to write about this? Maybe I shouldn't thrash as heavily here.

AMANDA HESS: I think when I first got pregnant and I was seeing how my Flo app was converting from this girl power, period app, to an app that seemed much more punishing, that was like, you now need to make an optimal human. I was immediately like, I should probably write about this. And so I was starting to take notes and take screenshots.

And then when I had an abnormal ultrasound One of my first thoughts was, you brought this. It was this mystical feeling that I brought this upon myself by believing that it was this light topic that I could write about and turn into something that was amusing. And I felt very superstitious that I had done something.

And I mean, once you have an abnormal ultrasound, the doctors are trying to figure out what it is and what it means. And so there's a whole investigation in fact into what you have done. You know, they're asking you if you took hot baths, if you took certain medications.

BLAIR HODGES: And part of it's not to blame you either, right? It's to say if there are medications or something, maybe we could track this and prevent other, you know, whatever. So. But it probably didn't feel like that to you. It felt like one.

AMANDA HESS: I know. And it felt like really beyond, like what little action did I take that was wrong during my pregnancy? And more like, what kind of person are you who would bring a child into the world and not just be the most possibly prepared to do it? Right? And so at that moment I was like, I've somehow cursed myself by just believing that I just had a normal pregnancy that I could just write about like this.

BLAIR HODGES: Were you already kind of a superstitious person or was that unusual for you just to think, oh, gosh, I did something, or maybe even thinking about doing a story about it?

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, it was incredibly bizarre for me. I think before this happened, I didn't even really understand on an emotional level why anyone would believe in ghosts or something. Now I understand more. I think I'm just more in touch with the non-rational influences on me. But once I had that feeling, then for a while I was like, obviously you're not going to write about this.

Then later, I think after my child was born, I started to think, that feeling you had, that intense feeling of shame and self-blame and feeling like an abnormal ultrasound was the worst thing that could happen to you are these are very like destructive ideas. And you should probably understand better why you were thinking those things and feeling them.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Amanda Hess. We're talking about her book Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. Amanda's also a critic-at-large for the New York Times right now, writing about internet and pop culture for the art section, and also contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine.

 

The Natural Birth Movement – 28:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: We hinted at this earlier, Amanda, that the internet introduced you to legions of women who believed pregnancy and childbirth had become too medicalized and they're taking pregnancy back. You could almost say they're “making pregnancy great again,” to use a triggering phrase. This is the free birth or natural birth movement. Not that a bunch of them are MAGA. I don't mean to suggest that, but I think the attitude is similar in envisioning an idealized past that needs to be reclaimed.

And as you said in the book, you're not religious or spiritual. You're a newspaper writer. You like science, you like precision. You're reading medical journals. But it seemed like these influencers sounded a siren call to you at first. It seemed to me you were drawn toward them not just for journalistic interest, but you were sort of, I don't know, maybe feeling something as you started to get introduced to some of what the algorithm starts serving up to you.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. So after my initial abnormal ultrasound, I had a much more abnormal ultrasound where a doctor told me she suspected the baby's brain was severely underdeveloped. And so I ended up getting a fetal MRI where I'm laying there, and they're doing various tricks to try to get the baby to be still in my stomach to basically fall asleep so they can get a look at a fetus's brain. And then after that MRI, the doctor told me that the brain was completely normal.

I think after that experience, I just realized that doctors aren't psychic, and they're very limited in what they can know, especially when their patient is inside of somebody else's body. So, you know, my faith in it was shaken, I think, and I started to become interested in these people who,

they call it freebirth. Resolved to give birth with no medical interventions at all.

No, they'll give birth at home, but with no midwife, not even a doula, usually, because they often consider a doula to be a part of an arm of the medical system, which they want to vanish from their birth experience.

Often these women will reach a point where they have such an alarming complication that they will call an ambulance and end up in the hospital. There's a pretty serious percentage of them that do end up seeking medical care, but it's as if the achievement is to do it completely alone. And there was so much about my own repressed feelings and suspicions about myself that I saw reflected very openly in them.

Just, why did I feel like birth was an achievement? And specifically, a feminine achievement, something that I had never directly aspired to really before it was. That idea was swimming around in me.

BLAIR HODGES: And then it sounds like you thought of having kids, but not giving birth.

AMANDA HESS: Yes. Or that the way I gave birth would be somehow meaningful, you know, whether I used pain relief or not, whether it was at home or in a hospital or in a birthing center or whatever.

BLAIR HODGES: Some of them are promising really pain free experiences too. They say they get in these sort of meditative trances where, “oh, you don't even really feel it. This is amazing!”

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. They call that supernatural pain-free childbirth. And there's a lot of overlap with religious communities and this community. So there's this idea that, basically like your faith in God will take your pain away.

But there's also this just this extreme feminine performance style it engenders, which is like, it's not just “you can withstand a huge amount of pain in order to bring a child into the world, which is your ultimate use as a human woman,” but you're so sort of purified and at one with this process that you don't even feel pain at all.

And for me, sometimes I'll still come across the images of women who claim to have pain-free births and there'll be pictures of them and where I'm like, this woman looks miserable. You know, it looks like she's in pain, but maybe she successfully dissociated during that experience. But the goal is to deny that your body has any needs at all, you know, as you're producing this other body.

BLAIR HODGES: They could do severance. Are you watching Severance? They have the birthing cabin—

AMANDA HESS: I know.

BLAIR HODGES: And they just have a severed person that's giving birth.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. Have my primal "innie" who only exists to birth. Yeah. I thought that was a nice touch. That made a lot of sense to me.

BLAIR HODGES: The question I have, though, is: as you're researching this, were you personally drawn in? Did you have a moment where you're like, “oh, I really want this to be true,” and then kind of fell away from that? Or were you holding it skeptically the whole time as just a curiosity to you?

AMANDA HESS: So I started listening to freebirth podcasts where women would tell these long stories and accounts of their freebirths and all of the aesthetic details of them.

BLAIR HODGES: This episode's sponsored by the Free Birth Society podcast. No, just kidding. [laughter]

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. So I wasn't listening to them as a fan, but I also wasn't hate listening either. I think it was filling this bizarre psychological need I had created through going down so deeply into a highly medicalized pregnancy where I was resolved to have this intensely monitored experience after I had these abnormal ultrasounds where my baby would be born and go straight to the NICU.

And so my pregnancy and the beginning of his life would be really run by doctors. And I think I had some reservations about that because I had just had this experience where a doctor told me that my baby's brain was underdeveloped. And then they were like, “Oh, never mind, it's completely fine.” And I was spinning out.

I was so anxious about that for obvious reasons. So I found that listening to these people who are giving birth with no assistance at all really contained all my anxieties about the medical system and allowed me to be more confident in my own choices, where I'm like, "well, I'm obviously not going to do that," you know? It makes sense for me to give birth in a hospital, in fact.

 

Eugenics and Ableism – 35:52

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you talk about how natural birth is a storytelling project, but pregnancies like yours didn't really fit the narrative because of possible complications. And that some of these episodes directly talk about that, where some freebirth people would say, yeah, you could give birth to a baby that's not—that will die right then, but they'll just say, “that's part of life,” and they'll sort of just release it into the universe.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, there are a couple of episodes that speak with women who had stillbirths or who had late miscarriages. And often they talk about this idea that, like, it's a kind of natural outcome for certain children to die. And listening to that was clarifying for me because I was like, I absolutely do not believe that way. I one hundred percent want a live child.

BLAIR HODGES: See, I'd kind of meet them halfway. What about this? Think about, like, some babies are going to die, and this is really hard. And so I want to say there could be something good in accepting that part of life. Not to avoid grief, not to spiritually or emotionally bypass it.

But then at the same time, if we have all these resources that could help, could help a baby live, that's worth trying for.

AMANDA HESS: I think, you know, for me, ultimately, underneath a lot of this is a strain of eugenic thinking that believes that. Not that you know, it's like having children, for me, was very much coming into contact with mortality, where suddenly I was like, well, I really can't die because I have to take care of my kids and they need to have a mother, you know.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AMANDA HESS: And one day my kids will die. And I think about that all the time, you know, hopefully not soon, hopefully after me, but they will die. And so there is a part of me that is a little envious of someone who can accept such eventualities because I certainly have not come to terms with the fact that that's going to happen.

But at the same time, there's also this belief that, you know, people who are born with certain disabilities or medical conditions really should not be alive.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

AMANDA HESS: And I've seen this in a lot of other spaces too, including among scientists who are developing biotechnologies, where there's a certain kind of techno-eugenicist who thinks our medical system is so advanced now that it's not weeding out the right people and that's weakening—

BLAIR HODGES: The overall human race or something.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I mean, when you're talking about birth, there's a history of eugenics in, I think, basically every birth technology. So there's something incredibly offensive and chilling about that.

And one of the things I was really interested in exploring in this book was when I was pregnant, I was so scared about having a child who had a disability or who had a rare genetic condition. Like, the word “syndrome” was like the scariest word to me. And then once my child was born and I was the mother of someone who had a disability, you know, my alliances were completely realigned.

And the idea that there are people who are earnestly working on technologies to eliminate disability becomes really scary to me because we know, and now more than ever, you know, there's just decreasing public investment in actually caring for people, whether they're disabled people, pregnant people, elderly people, whatever. And the fact that our society might be more excited about preventing these people from existing as opposed to treating them, I think is really alarming.

BLAIR HODGES: Your chapter nine, it's called “Growth,” is so good on this issue. And you also talk about your ambivalence about abortion, you’re pro-choice, but you also recognize that can be used to “cull the herd,” so to speak. Like you mentioned, this is a way to weed out disability through prenatal testing.

It's undergirded by eugenics and abortion. And we live in a society that doesn't have enough supports for people with disabilities or their families. And so there's also some temptation to perhaps seek an abortion because there's not going to be enough support for some people. So with you, you're wrestling with this, and you had to confront your own ableism in ways you hadn't previously anticipated. There's a saying that I've said before, “I don't care who my baby is as long as they're healthy.” That phrase “as long as they're healthy—"

AMANDA HESS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: That is such a loaded thing to say that you don't realize until you experience people with disabilities.

AMANDA HESS: Right. I mean, one of the things I explore in the book, it’s presented as a neutral thing, it's like, “I don't care if it's a boy or a girl. I care if they're healthy.” Or like, “ten fingers, ten toes” is another one I think is, when you really think about it for two seconds, pretty bizarre.

BLAIR HODGES: It's gross.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah. It's like, “you know, actually, I will take my child with any number of fingers or toes. That's not the most important thing about a person...”

And so, yeah, I mean, I think it really complicated some of my feelings about abortion, where I still feel like it should be available to everyone at any stage of pregnancy. And I actually feel more seriously, emotionally sure of that than I did before. A baby, like a fetus, or at whatever stage, it's so entwined with your body, and I don't think that choice should be taken away from anyone.

But it also made me much more interested in the reproductive justice movement, which explores all these things we need to make people truly have free choices when they're making that choice.

And that includes actual support for caregivers of disabled children, which we don't have. And we have less and less. Like, the children's hospital that my son goes to just had millions of dollars of funding slashed by Elon Musk, personally, it seems. So it's a real consideration that people have to make, which I think is a shame.

But I think there was also something else going on in my mind, and it wasn't simply, “Can I handle this? Can I afford this?” It was, I feel this sense of shame around having a child who's not normal. And I realized that when people say they want a healthy child, what they really mean is they want a “normal” child. And I never would have said that. I never would have articulated that I desire to produce a normal child. But it was embedded very deeply in me, that idea. I did want that.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AMANDA HESS: And sort of exploring that feeling was one of the things I was most interested in doing in the book. Where for someone like me who is able-bodied at the moment, doesn't have a lot of, or hadn't had a lot of interaction with the disabled community. There are so many people like me whose first, kind of like, real life experience with disability is confronting this medical question during pregnancy.

And when you're pregnant, the idea of a disability or, you know, a medical condition is so ripped out of human context because you don't know anything about your baby. I never had a baby before, and I didn't know just how instantly delighted I would be by them.

All you know is they have this syndrome that causes a collection of physical changes and differences. And so I think in order for people to really be able to make free choices, we need to be talking about that and having a real discussion about unacknowledged ableism and eugenic thinking, frankly, that I think exists in a lot of people.

 

Being a Medical Mom – 44:36

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the book is when you're talking about when your son was watching Dumbo. In the book, you call your son Alma. That's a pseudonym the internet had falsely assigned to him which you carry that through the book. It's cool.

But he's watching Dumbo and it's hitting you now how much the story is about disability, now that you have a son with a very large tongue. And you're watching as he's watching this movie about an elephant with these huge ears. And there's this scene you describe where there's these other mothers. Mrs. Jumbo is there with her baby, loves her baby so much. And the other moms are so cruel and saying all these terrible things. And you used to think maybe that's a bit ham-fisted, but you realize now that the commentary is kind of real. People say stuff. And you've seen people saying things on the internet. You've heard comments about your own son.

So you quickly looked up Dumbo because that's kind of what you do. You searched “Dumbo disability, disability studies,” and you found that, you know, Dumbo's problematic. It tells a story that makes a person with a disability into a kind of superhero because of their disability, which redeems them.

To me, it's sort of like the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer situation where he's got this red nose, he's ostracized for it. But then if it benefits other people or entertains them or whatever, then it redeems the character, and that's problematic.

You grant that, but you also noticed other things and it was really moving to me. What else did Dumbo do for you, what you saw in that film.

AMANDA HESS: When I started to look for disabled writers reflecting on Dumbo, I found an essay by this woman, Victoria Lucas, who has a condition called cherubism, and it produces an enlarged lower face. And she writes an essay about how she first saw Dumbo when she was nine years old, then later realized it was the first time she had seen some kind of representation of someone who had a similar condition in a movie.

And there was a way in which that was comforting for her. And Dumbo sort of became a kind of role model for her. And I realized as I was watching the movie that I was paying very close attention to Dumbo's mother and what she does in the movie. And I think just. I was just so naturally drawn to try to watch this old, you know, racist Disney movie to try to get some clues about how I should be negotiating my own role.

Dumbo’s mother does something at the beginning of the film where Dumbo is delivered to her by the stork, and she sees he's this adorable elephant who has these very large ears, and she immediately wraps him in his own ears as this kind of baby blanket. And it's just such a beautiful image of Dumbo and his mother, just adapting to his body, and it's really beautiful.

And then she does some things that are less beautiful, where she becomes so angry at these other elephants who are making fun of Dumbo that she physically assaults them. And she's put in a kind of zoo prison. And Dumbo needs to, you know, his whole journey to impress the circus is really so he can free his mother. And so the movie also got me started thinking about the ways in which my own reactions to my son's disability and to people's comments about it could also hurt my son, and my own feelings could become a burden that he might be expected to shoulder above everything else.

And so that's a theme that I explore in that chapter.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. This is where you talk about the medical mom role. And also we see you exploring Reddit as a place to kind of think through things. This is really interesting. I don't spend a ton of time on Reddit. I go there occasionally. But you talk about What I'll call lurker psychology. You nailed it in a way that I'd never thought about it.

You were saying that you were seeking out simulations of all your unspoken conversations. That's a brilliant way of putting it.

AMANDA HESS: I'm such a lurker. I think because I'm a professional writer and I have to write all the time for my job, I'm not a poster. I just don't spend a lot of time posting.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, don't write for free. Come on.

AMANDA HESS: Especially during the first years of my kids lives, I found myself doing this a lot where I was just acting out dramas from my own life within, like these anonymous threads and sort of projecting the thoughts of Redditors onto my neighbors or people who I would, strangers I would pass on the street, you know, and there is a way in which I think the internet is a place where, you know, the norms are different.

And especially if you're anonymous, there are things that you may say there that you may not say anywhere else. And so I took the leap of, you know, feeling whether it's maybe not on a rational level, but on an emotional level, that this was the internal monologue of everyone who I was interacting with and these were the things that they didn't want to say out loud.

And the internet is so fused to my own thinking. You know, I really, in the book treat it as kind of like a stage for acting out like the dramas of my mind. And that's what I go to Reddit for.

 

Is the Internet a Net Positive? – 50:27

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And I have to ask you if you think it's a net positive or net negative, and maybe it's not fair to do it so black and white. But I ask because like you said, people can say whatever they want in many cases on the internet, or at least there's a lot fewer guardrails.

And I feel like it can be easier to spread prejudice because you can have it reinforced to you more than you could, like maybe you wouldn't meet so many openly ableist or racist or sexist or misogynist people at your high school, because maybe people aren't going to be as open about it at school or something, or in the workplace, but you can go on the internet and get “red-pilled,” quote unquote, and find out all kinds of crap and get sucked into terrible ways of thinking, in ways that if we didn't have the internet—

And there's the flip side of that, where marginalized communities have been able to find each other and find growth, and LGBTQ communities have been able to develop new discourse and language around their experiences.

So I see positives and negatives, but I just wonder what your take is on that.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I mean, you may have noticed that I don't have many sort of solutions in my book. And I really did try to—I never have a strong kind of feeling or answer about those questions, like whether you should actually use a certain gadget or not.

Because technology is here, and to me, it's the water that we're swimming in. And I feel like the thing that interests me is trying to understand how it works as a storytelling mechanism. But whether society would be better off if certain things did or didn't exist, I have no idea. I don't know.

I do think that internet products, like any other company, should be owned by workers and not by billionaires. I don't know if that would necessarily make the product less evil, but it would solve one problem, which is that, you know, now they create these tech oligarchs who become our political overlords.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

AMANDA HESS: So I think we could focus on that first.

 

Marketing, Capitalism, and Parenthood – 52:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: I also love your exploration in general of the marketing and capitalism of parenting in this book. There's a chapter called “Gear,” where all the equipment that is promising to make parents lives easier. There's that robotic crib, the Snoo, which is like, oh, it's gonna perfectly rock your baby to sleep, and it will detect if your baby starts to stir and all this.

And you tried it out and you found it's sort of like The Jetsons, the old cartoon where most of the stuff in the future kind of sucks. They have some cool technology and stuff, but it only sort of half works, and it usually causes as many problems as it could solve.

So I liked seeing you say you and Mark were less susceptible to all the advertising for your second kid because you're like, okay fool me once, shame on you. [laughs]

AMANDA HESS: Right, right. Exactly. And also I already had too much stuff, so I was like, you know, I'm not gonna be buying more. I think that's why it’s so important for these companies to capture you while you're pregnant. Because when you're pregnant, before you have any babies, you have no idea.

And babies actually do need a few things that are completely bizarre and that, if you're not a parent, you've never encountered before, but you don't necessarily know what those things are and which ones are just completely superfluous.

BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite things were these plastic toys, but they were these hook things, and they would kind of form together in a chain, and we would use those to hook their toys to the stroller or, whatever. And I never would have bought that for myself, but someone bought those for us, and that was one of my favorite things we had.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I know. Yeah. Like, occasionally they're very helpful. And that's really, you know, it's the same thing with parenting advice. Instagrams, where, once in a while they tell you to tell, just word for word, say this to your kid. And it works one time. Like, they're just not upset anymore.

And then you, I just—you'll just always go back. Even if 99% of the things they say are completely useless.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. A couple months ago—I follow some neurodivergent ones, some parents of neurodivergent folks, and a lot of these are actual therapists as well. So they're working. They're trained as well. I tend to try to go more toward expertise than just your random person. But they talked about how, for some neurodivergent kids, touch is a really helpful way to center them and get them to lock in.

So I'm not trying to make my kid ultra compliant and obedient in all situations, but if I need my kid to go to the bathroom in the morning and he just refuses to do it, they said just go up and hold their hand and just say, come with me.

And so I made up this thing for my kid called the Pinky Train. I just go up to him with my pinky out and we hook pinkies, and he'll follow me anywhere. It was the weirdest magic trick. It's magic. It works. It still works. I think it's only failed once. So yeah. And I'm like, wow. I got this tip on the internet from Instagram and it was brilliant.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: But then a bunch of other tips don't apply to my kid at all, so.

AMANDA HESS: Right. I mean, it's so amazing. My broad experience with the pregnancy internet and then the baby internet was, so much of it is set up for a quote unquote, “normal” person or a “normal” baby or “normal” pregnancy. And so at first, when I did have a normal pregnancy, it seemed like these apps and influencers knew so much about me that we shared so much, and they had this intimate insight into what was going on with me.

And then the minute that my pregnancy was revealed as abnormal, in fact, it was as if they had nothing to sell me anymore. And I started to get these advertisements for this website called Anatomy Warehouse, which sells plastic body parts to medical students and to medical schools.

And it was because, you know, I had gone from Googling “morning sickness cure” to a very specific measurement of a very specific body part of a fetus. And it was like, okay, well, now you're in bizarro medical world. You're cast out.

And that was true with books as well. Even books that are produced today, pregnancy books. At the end, there'll be this little squared off appendix that's like, “if you have any abnormalities in your pregnancy, read this. But if you don't, do not read this, because it's too frightening. It's too scary for you. So just stay away from it.” And then, even then, you know, it only really covers a very limited sort of band of conditions.

BLAIR HODGES: The internet sort of treats us like a weird aunt that we don't see very often, but she maybe saw us reading a graphic novel once, a very specific one. And then she gets this idea in her head, “oh, this kid likes books,” and buys you an encyclopedia or something not related. Right? You know, like the weird aunt that kind of gets the gift wrong a little bit.

AMANDA HESS: I know, which is why, you know, it ends up becoming so humiliating when, like, it starts to feel like you need to see what it's offering you, you know, which, during my pregnancy, it felt like I did.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Amanda Hess. We're talking about her new book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. And you might have seen some of Amanda's work in other places, like Slate magazine. She was an editor at Good Magazine and columnist at the Washington City Paper, and she was also the second vice president for the News Guild of New York. Unions are great. Three cheers for that.

 

The Anti-Natal Movement – 58:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: So, Amanda, I wanted to talk now about the judgment factor. So the technology of texting is great for parents in many ways, but for you, it became the downstairs neighbors texting you constantly about the fact that you have a toddler who's making some noise. And this part maybe triggered me more than most of the book.

I don't know why I felt in my heart the disability stuff, but in terms of just getting really angry, I was so mad that your downstairs neighbor was texting you all the time and being like, “it's too loud up there!” And then you got into reading about all the anti-natalist movement stuff.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I mean, I had these downstairs neighbors who were constantly texting me to complain about my kids being too loud. And to be clear, my kids are too loud. Like they are very loud. And like it's something that I wish on a personal level I could manage more easily. But they, you know, even now they're only 2 and 4. And so it's really a life project that we're working on that's prime time for the loudness. Yeah, they're very loud.

And so I, you know, I'm sympathetic, but also like most of the time there's nothing I can do about it. Like, I can't muzzle them. I can work with them on these long-term solutions to try not to like wake up and immediately start jumping around and screaming.

But it's not something I can, when I get a text, I can be like, “oh, sorry, putting the muzzle on the 18-month-old,” or whatever, you know?

So these texts really started to bother me. And they bothered me because they were annoying that someone expected me to resolve this situation that I couldn't resolve. But also they bothered me because I got this sense from them that it was my duty as a parent, if I wanted to be a good parent, to make my children compliant and to make other adults comfortable with my children existing in the world.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you owe it to the world. Cause you're one of those breeders.

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, exactly. And it really is this situation where at that point, you know, I didn't want to have a true relationship with my neighbors because I didn't want to get more enmeshed in this and I didn't want to get more involved. And that's a really bad thing. Like, that's a really sad thing.

And it ended up being this the case where the only thing I shared with these neighbors was my floor and their ceiling. And I think it's a really bad vision for society where that is the only communal benefit or a non-benefit as it may be, to living together. So yeah, that was something I was grappling with at the end of the book.

BLAIR HODGES: It's funny that your response to it was to dig into Reddit forums that hated kids. Like Mark pointed this out. He's like, “I'm kind of drawn to content that kind of helps make me feel better. And you're like actively seeking out the stuff that really makes you feel worse!”

AMANDA HESS: Yeah, I mean, I think that also is the whole reason I wrote this book is because I experienced a lot of things that were—I had a lot of thoughts and feelings that were incredibly ableist, and they were very traditional and at times, incredibly conservative. And I wanted to understand why I had had all of these responses that I felt like were just very negative and bad.

And so the whole book is really my sort of attempt to understand my unique form of internal villainy. I guess I was trying to really understand the parts of myself that I was most confused about and ashamed by. And that's often what I'm doing when I go on the internet, too.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I was so happy to go along with you for the ride. I learned so much from the book, and there's so much we didn't have time to talk about. You talk about things like the rise of gentle parenting and discourse about the trauma that previous generations of parents inflicted on us.

You talk about the rise of the tradwife movement. There are explorations of medical racism. You talk about your C-section and how difficult that was and the history of C-sections and medical procedures. There's so much more in the book. It's called Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. I can't recommend it enough, Amanda. Truly, this is such a good book. I loved every page, really.

AMANDA HESS: Thank you so much.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 1:02:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Amanda. We always like to close with a segment called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. And we're recording this interview before your book comes out in May so you might not have very many regrets about it at this point. I don't know. But you might have some challenges you experienced while you were putting the book together or some surprises that happened because of doing the book.

And so it's kind of a “choose your own adventure” question where you get to tell us something about what it's like getting this book out there.

AMANDA HESS: I mean, I have a lot of regrets. I could just do all regrets. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, good! I should have known. Based on the book itself.

AMANDA HESS: I regret not writing a book before I had children. I had so much time, and I just, I didn't know. I didn't know how much time I had. And there's definitely a part of me that, after I had kids, I became this obsessive freak about working on the book. And I was stuck in my house a lot, you know? Cause I really didn't realize this. But once you have kids, you have to stay there even when they're sleeping. You gotta be there all the time. So I did have that time where I was stuck there, but I just had so much more time before I had kids.

BLAIR HODGES: See, but even when you are home there, the mental furniture seems very occupied anyway. So you might think, I'm gonna put my kid down for a nap and go get some other stuff done. But I don't know, you're so burnt out or just stretched thin because of other stuff that even that free time you have is a little bit sparse.

AMANDA HESS: I know. I often have to clean up my surroundings and fold my laundry before I can focus on work, which is bad because that's never done.

I have more regrets.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, let's hear them.

AMANDA HESS: I would have cut more of the book. I cut some really, like, at the very end, as I was just really sending it to copyedit, I made some crucial chops. But I think, you know, I was really concerned about covering every angle. And, of course, you can't.

I have so many thoughts and feelings about everything in my book that have just continued to complicate themselves and that I could never put in there. But you also have to just think about the book as a book and a reading experience, and I think I should have been more brutal about that. And I have one more regret.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, before you get to that, I do want to say, too, there's a great critique of individualistic ideas of parenting and communal ideas of parenting at the end, where you talk about how you kind of went to this rebirth or this sort of gentle parenting, or this retreat for woman, Womanland or something, where it's just all the moms go out there, and you noticed how this supposedly hippie, communal place was all about individualistic, individualized, isolated parenting philosophy, which should run counter to the kind of community ethos you'd expect at a place like that.

I think your critique of parenting as becoming so isolated for parents is spot on. And I'm glad you explored it without making the whole book about that. It's just something you pinpoint, so.

But I get it. I mean, even in this interview, I'm like, “oh, shoot, I really wanted to talk about that. Or that. And we didn't have time for it,” so I feel you.

All right. I want more regrets, though. You said you had one more.

AMANDA HESS: I have one more regret. In a book, you want your character to be interesting, and you want them to be complex and also, I think, a little bad. But on the internet, you want a character, especially if that character is a woman, especially if she's a mom, to be perfect. Like, you don't want that person to have flaws.

And, you know, I think I spent a lot of time—I don't know how much of this actually showed up in the book, but I spent a lot of time worrying about what people would think of me, not as a writer or as a character, but as a person. Am I a bad person?

And it's like, of course I'm a bad person. And I'm a good person, and everybody is, you know, whatever. I would never call another person a “bad person” unless they were really quite world-historically bad. So the fact that I said it so much about myself was not helpful, I think, in just clearing my head to write the book.

But I definitely think people have a different experience encountering a character in a book, even if it's a memoir, than they do encountering a real random person on the internet, where you just read about one stupid thing that they did or thought, you know, so it's hard to balance those things at a time when many parts of my book could end up on the internet, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I mean, my impression of you was of a person who was willing to talk about your flaws. And, I mean, that's refreshing. Right? It also didn't seem confessional for the sake of being confessional. I just, I liked thinking along with you.

I think the fact that you would even reflect on how you felt as a person or if you were living according to your ethics or what your ethics even were, or were they squared away, I felt a lot in common with that. And that, to me, is the mark of a person that I'd want to spend time with, whether saying that person's good or bad. I could set that aside and just say, I like how this person thinks and challenges my thinking. I just enjoyed spending time with you in the book.

AMANDA HESS: Okay, well, I'm gonna cut that part of the podcast, and I'm gonna play it back to myself as I write my next book.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, good, you have one in mind already?

AMANDA HESS: I wish I could only write books. There are several books I want to write. But also, Mark is writing a book now, and that's a lot for me to deal with because he was so helpful as I was writing my book. And now it's time for me to be helpful to him.

So I have to sort of manage that also before I start writing another one of my own.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you're a terrific writer. I can't recommend the book enough. Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. Like I said, I'm about ten years away from the parenting stage you're describing. There were so many similarities and differences between now and then. It was just fascinating.

And I think even people who don't have kids or don't want to have kids, this is the kind of book I'd love to see people dig into. It's great. Just sort of looking over the fence or hitting the broom into the ceiling of the apartment above us, the lives that we aren't living. Your book definitely did that for me. So, Amanda, thanks a ton for talking to me about it and for writing the book. I'm excited to know you're going to be doing more books.

AMANDA HESS: Thank you so much. I had a lot of fun.

That did not sound convincing. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: I love that. And I'm not cutting it.

AMANDA HESS: It's actually not like the most fun thing for me to talk about my work, actually, but it was like, I love talking to you.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, good.

AMANDA HESS: Maybe we could talk about something else next time. The next episode.

BLAIR HODGES: Does it feel self-indulgent to you or something?

AMANDA HESS: No, it's just. Because it's done and I can't change it. It's hard to think about what it is, and I want to just pretend it doesn't exist anymore.

But also, I think as I was writing it, I didn't really know what it was about. And now I'm like, well, I gotta pretend like I do so I can make podcast listeners at least want to perhaps try reading it. So I have to figure that out, you know?

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, well, take a page from my friend Lauren Sandler, who's been on the show before. She has no hesitation of disagreeing with her own self at times. So if I put a question to her from her book, she's like, “oh, yeah, I kind of actually don't really see it like that now.” So just take that. Like, you get to say whatever you think now. Don't feel locked in by what you wrote.

AMANDA HESS: I actually, right after I finished the book, I was like, “oh, well, this book is the complete encapsulation of everything I think. And it can be just read and judged now.”

And now that I'm several months away from that, I'm like, “oh, this book isn't about me. It's about this person that I was a few months ago. And, you know, it will just continue to be that.”

BLAIR HODGES: Perfect. It's Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. Amanda Hess, thanks for being here.

AMANDA HESS: Thank you so much.

 

Outro – 1:10:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's it for this episode of Relationscapes. I'm journalist Blair Hodges. Thanks for listening. If something in this discussion resonated with you, I hope you'll pass the show along. Word of mouth is one of the biggest ways podcasts grow. You can also rate and review the show in Apple Podcast or in Spotify.

And by the way, March was the first month since I launched the show that I didn't get a new review in Apple Podcasts. So we broke our streak! I got a few new ratings, but nobody wrote a review. So please head over there, go into Apple Podcasts, look up the show, scroll down to ratings and reviews, tap on that, and then it'll say, “write a review.” You can do that. It's easy, it's quick, and I'll read it here on the show. I want to mispronounce your name, so go leave a review in Apple Podcasts.

Mates of State provides our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges and I'll see you next time.