Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment

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.