Data Baby
My Life in a Psychological Experiment
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Belletrist Book Pick for December 2023
Lab Girl meets Brain on Fire in this provocative and poignant memoir delving into a woman's formative experiences as a veritable "lab rat" in a lifelong psychological study, and her pursuit to reclaim autonomy and her identity as a adult.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Breslin's fascinating debut memoir tackles the fallout from her enrollment in a psychological experiment as a child. Born in 1968 in Berkeley, Calif., to a poetry professor father and English instructor mother, Breslin sensed her mother's resentment early on: "Instead of getting her Ph.D., my mother had gotten married... then she got pregnant... and as her career floundered, my father's flourished." To increase her own free time, Breslin's mother enrolled a four-year-old Breslin in the Block Project at UC Berkeley, an experiment in which she "would be studied for the next 30 years in a groundbreaking psychological experiment that would predict who would grow up to be." What began as a preschool with specific, data-collecting criteria gave way to regular psychological evaluations through one-way mirrors and home monitoring via parental reports—all agreed upon before Breslin could even conceptualize "consent." At 15, Breslin began to numb her adolescent emotional pain with drinking, drugs, and sex, the latter of which became the focus of her career as a journalist covering the porn industry. By the time she hit middle age and found herself stuck in an abusive marriage, Breslin began to reflect on the Block Project's impact on her trajectory. Unpicking thorny questions about determinism and the ethics of human experimentation, Breslin attacks her subject with verve and wit, resisting woe-is-me solipsism without defanging her critiques of the study that rocked her life. It's gripping stuff.