My Life In A Psychological Experiment

About the Book

What if your parents turn you into a human lab rat when you’re a child? Will that change the story of your life? Will that change who you are?

When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of over a hundred children who are research subjects in an unprecedented thirty-year study of personality development that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in what she feels is an abusive marriage and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped her identity and life choices. Already a successful journalist, she makes her own curious history the subject of her next investigation. From experiment rooms with one-way mirrors, to children’s puzzles with no solutions, to condemned basement laboratories, her life-changing journey uncovers the long-buried secrets hidden behind the renowned study. The question at the gnarled heart of her quest: Did the study know her better than she knew herself?

At once bravely honest and sharply witty, Data Baby is a compelling and provocative account of a woman’s quest to find her true self, and an unblinking exploration of why we turn out as we do. Few people in all of history have been studied from such a young age and for as long as this author, but the message of her book is universal. In an era when so many of us are looking to technology to tell us who to be, it’s up to us to discover who we actually are. 

On SaleNov 7, 2023

Page Count224 pages

Publisher Legacy Lit

Since I take a book at face value, which for me means the title and book cover. (I seldom read the blub.) I was excited to start reading since my imagination was running wild.

But what I discovered was more of a memoir that felt a bit here and there. Interesting. Absolutely. But, for me, it really didn’t reflect the title until I got to the end. 

Breslin was born in 1968. Her parents, academics who seemed more in tune with their jobs than family, enrolled their baby in the Block Project, a psychology experiment almost the moment she was born. In essence, she would be a laboratory animal to be observed and have data gathered for researchers. This started as an exclusive preschool at the University of California, Berkeley. Though the periodic visits and observations were low-keyed, the study continued for 30 years. The purpose was to study personalities to see if they would predict adult choices in life.

From there Breslin’s story veers off and doesn’t seem to relate that much to her earlier testing, Since I’ve read many memoirs in the last few months, I felt her life journey was more relevant to her early family experiences than the study. The study seemed to be one of the only times that Breslin felt seen. Important. Special.

In time she turned to investigative journalism, which is evident by her well-written book. But she did turn up some very sad information when she directed her research to the Block Project. 

My Concerns

Susannah is quite open and frank regarding her studies in pornography. This might be something you want to be aware of. Does it help describe her journey, of course. But it’s not for everyone.

Final Thoughts

While it was slightly off-key to many of the other memoirs that I’ve been reading, I’m not disappointed in the least to have read it. The writing is good, and it definitely left me thinking. But my thoughts may be different than yours.

  1. Was it her family that was more of her life’s trajectory than Block Project, or both?

My thanks to Grand Central Publishing Hachette and Susannah Breslin for a #gifted copy of Data Baby: My Life In A Psychological Experiment

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susannah Breslin is a freelance journalist and a Forbes.com senior contributor. From 2018 to 2019, she was the Lawrence Grauman Jr. Post-graduate Fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program. Her reporting and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Harper’s Bazaar, The Daily Beast, Salon, Newsweek, The Guardian, and Variety, among other media outlets. She holds a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

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