Amanda Hess Wrote a Memoir. Read It as a Competitive Brief.

Second Life is the best account I've read of what a well-run marketing funnel feels like from the inside. I don't think Amanda Hess set out to write that book. She set out to write about having a baby. What came back is 272 pages of field notes on the machinery I get paid to build for food, beverage, CPG and lifestyle clients, taken down by somebody standing at the wrong end of it with a phone in her hand at two in the morning.

The book landed on May 6, 2025. On Goodreads it sits at 4.06 across 1,823 ratings, with 280 readers who cared enough to write something. That's a small, intense crowd, which is exactly the crowd worth listening to. The reviews are where the useful stuff is, and they say something the book itself never quite comes out and says.

The glowing reviews are all describing the same thing

Go read the top of the pile and count how many people reach for the identical sentence. Cheryl Klein opens hers with "It's like Amanda Hess climbed inside my head (or my algorithm?)". Bridget Krupa gets there in one line: "It's like she was in my own head and eloquently narrating my reactions to what it's like to have and raise babies right now."

She got in my head. That's the review, over and over, from readers who have never sat through a media plan in their lives.

I want to be blunt about what that reaction is, because my industry benefits from everybody staying fuzzy on it. When a campaign is working, the person on the receiving end doesn't think, well, that was competent segmentation. They think, how did they know. The feeling of being understood and the fact of being sorted into a bucket land in the body the same way. Hess spent a pregnancy inside that machine, wrote down what it felt like, and a few thousand readers recognized their own lives in it. Every one of those five-star reviews is a case study, and none of them were written as one.

Pregnancy capitalism, and why it has the best media kit in the business

Lauren M put it plainly. The book made her realize there is "a whole world of pregnancy capitalism that I knew nothing about, but that is apparently being foisted on expecting and new mothers via social media and the broader internet."

Nobody in my line of work is surprised by that. Life-event triggers are the oldest reliable money in targeting. Moving, marrying, having a baby. In ordinary conditions a person's buying habits are close to fossilized, and then one of those three things happens and the whole set comes loose at once. Hess calls new parents the holy grail of retail, and a reader named Dominic pulls the line that explains why: they are "exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs."

Ashlee's review names the specific companies, from the period app to the genetic testing lab to the baby monitor, and then lands the part I keep thinking about. The old system, she writes, where "the wisdom and communal childrearing practices that were once imparted through multigenerational communities have been supplanted and replaced by assistive technologies that surveil and isolate."

Read that as a market analysis instead of a lament and it gets uglier. A grandmother giving advice over a kitchen table is a competitor with no revenue model. Anything that replaced her had to be at least as available at three in the morning, and the only things that qualify are a subscription and a feed.

Hess has a line about her son's early months that Hannah Schumacher copied into her review because it stopped her cold: "my relationship with my baby was supplanted by my relationship with his information." I have written client decks that promise essentially that outcome and used friendlier nouns for it. Data-driven care. A connected experience. The nouns are mine. The sentence is hers, and hers is honest.

The critics have a real point, and it is not the one they think

The dissent is worth as much as the praise here. emma, whose review is the most-liked one on the book, gave it four stars and still said "the chapters felt like they fell where they landed, not really building toward anything but an abrupt ending." A reader going by Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship put the book down at page 120 with a sharper version: "There are lots of observations and experiences but without analysis or reflection." Brendan, reviewing as a dad and mostly a fan, flagged the passages that gesture at wider structural claims and said "Examples like this need much deeper analysis than what she gives." Pat, four stars, wrote that "I felt that the through line was inconsistent."

They're all describing the same defect and they're all right that it is there. Where I part company is on what it means.

A feed does not build an argument. It accumulates. You get an ultrasound result, then a targeted ad, then a Facebook group, then a podcast about freebirth, then a monitor that promises to watch the baby breathe, and no chapter of that ever resolves before the next one starts. Hess wrote the shape of the thing she was describing. The critics wanted her to step outside it and file a thesis. My honest read is that she could not, because nobody can while they are still in it, and the reviewers who felt the book fell apart in the back half were mostly people who had stopped being scared by then.

Where the criticism does bite: when she reaches for structural claims outside her own experience, the reporting thins out fast. Brendan is right about that. Krishna Prakash's five-star review lists what the book touches, from "Big Data and tracking consumers, medical racism, the rise of conservatism and trad-wife culture, influencers, hypochondriasis fueled by the internet," and that list is the problem stated as a compliment. Seven subjects, 272 pages, one of them her own life. Something had to be thin.

The exit is also a product, which is the part everybody misses

Marisa, five stars, finished the book and landed where a lot of readers land: "the obvious solution to all of this is (generally) to get off the Internet and social media."

I understand the impulse and I think it is a trap, and Hess's own reporting is what proves it. The book's back half wanders into freebirth influencers and tradwife content and crunchy wellness, which is to say directly into the off-ramp. That off-ramp is a market. It has creators, sponsorships, courses, supplements, an aesthetic and a conversion funnel. Bridget H came out of the book with the detail that has stuck with me longest: she "Learned that the first person to popularize period tracking (for a western audience at least) was a Nazi botanist." The natural alternative to the surveillance product is often just an older product with better lighting.

Ali Baker Bryant, who loved the book, said it "really highlights how many people are capitalizing on new moms," and she means all of them. The app and the herbalist are on the same side of that sentence.

What I am taking into the next client meeting

Three things, and none of them are the ones the book jacket promises.

The trigger moment matters more than the shoot. I can make a jar of salsa look like a Sunday afternoon in Marfa, and it will do nothing at all if it shows up in a week when nothing in that person's life has come loose. Hess's chapters are a map of the weeks when everything comes loose. Every planner already knows this and mostly says it in a voice that would not survive being quoted back.

Community features are a managed forum with a paywall, and users can feel the seam. Dominic's review notices that some phrases in the app's forum are censored while other features sit behind a subscription. Readers noticed. They always notice, and they resent it later even when they pay.

And the reaction we are chasing, that she was in my head feeling, is the same reaction that turns on you. The reviews that say she got inside my head and the reviews that say I want off this internet were often written by the same person about the same book. Danielle T's line for it is that our fears "get converted into currency for clicks or to buy stuff," and she says it about a book she gave four stars and enjoyed.

Jayli Esber wrote that Hess "is just exposing the complexities that exist at this modern intersection," with no call to action attached, and treated that restraint as the book's achievement. For a reader, sure. For anybody working in this trade, the absence of a call to action is the invitation. Hess handed us 272 pages of documentation on how the buying decision actually gets made in the worst week of somebody's life, and she left it to us to decide what to do with it.

I'd rather my clients read it and feel a little sick than not read it and keep selling like the machine is neutral.

giovanni gallucci works out of Marfa, Texas.

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I help food brands build real organic communities through strategy, content, and brand storytelling. If your content feels busy but ineffective, that is the problem I fix. Follow me @gallucciNET on social media.