The story of pregnancy, birth, and new parenthood follows a preordained, overarching plot—ignorance to knowledge, innocence to experience—but its contours are as variable as the curves of a pregnant body or an individual digital footprint. As a longtime reporter on internet culture for The New York Times and elsewhere, Amanda Hess excels at connecting our private online encounters to wider cultural shifts. In her debut memoir of “having a child in the digital age,” she skewers the fluttering trends and quirks of the internet with the gentle ruthlessness of a lepidopterist, whether she’s describing the TikTok spectacle of tradwives in kitchens “as white as a near-death experience,” or escaping angry Reddit forums to ride the “pastel carousels” of Instagram. What quickly emerges from her tale is how atomized our digital lives have become, how splintered our shared reality. As a case in point, when Hess asks her husband what he thinks of their using the period-tracking app Flo to help them conceive, he reminds her, “You used the app.” Like “an appealingly dull video game,” Flo has sharpened Hess’s nascent desire for a baby into a plan, tipping her off to hormonal fluctuations and nudging her with reminders, until she unlocks the elusive pregnancy mode. “Obviously, I told the internet before I told my parents,” she says.

Pregnant and potentially pregnant people might feel hazily resistant to shoveling information about our bodies and sex lives into the maw of the internet, but at the same time, it strikes most of us as impossible, even absurd, to maintain the old boundaries of public versus private. While I was writing this review, a news story popped up in my Bluesky feed that Flurry, a data analytics company, recently paid $3.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit for improperly harvesting the data users fed into Flo. It’s been more than a decade since Janet Vertesi, writing in Time, described how her efforts to dodge the internet’s pregnancy-marketing laser beam pushed her to the shadowy margins of anonymized accounts, incognito browsing, and all-cash payments. Hess enlists a reverse-tracking system to discover that a single WebMD search sent up a flare that ignited the entire ecosystem. Then, when she was 14 weeks pregnant, the pandemic hit, and the blaze burst any containment. More anxious and isolated than ever before, expectant and new parents were more susceptible than they had ever been to anyone with something to sell—a product, an app, an ideology. Before those isolation years, there were corners of the internet untouched by commerce; it has since been, as Hess puts it, “razed, pumped with capital, and rebuilt as a platform for........

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