A year before reporter Susannah Breslin was born in 1968, Maurice Pappworth published his book Human Guinea Pigs: Experimentation on Man, an expose on unethical human experimentation. The book galvanized the public and the scientific field, prompting widespread reform in human subject research in the 1970s. The very idea of the human subject, the “meat” of psychological research, came under heavy scrutiny, with some advocating for its disallowance entirely.

These conversations did not touch Breslin for most of her childhood, throughout which she largely remained unaware that she was a part of an experiment. The premise is Truman Show-esque. Breslin even epigraphs her memoir with a quote from the movie: “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.” Yet in her memoir, Breslin’s reality can’t seem to escape distortion — what she knows is constantly destabilized, a process that causes her present to frequently fold in on itself, leading her back to the past. Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment is an investigation into Breslin’s life and psyche — her central project is to retrace the steps of her life and consider how her unwilling enrollment in a psychological study affected it. 

Breslin was one of about 100 children enrolled in the Block and Block Longitudinal Study, a scientific undertaking conceived by personality research psychologists Jack and Jeanne Block that ran for three decades. The study’s researchers wanted to know if they could predict who children would become based on observing their childhood. Participants were drawn from a pool of the children of UC Berkeley faculty and staff, and for the first years of their lives, they were observed at a preschool that doubled as a testing ground and free childcare. The participants scattered after graduating from this school, to different schools and even different countries. The Blocks would either meet with them or send them extensive surveys to fill out when they reached critical developmental ages to collect data. 

Today, the Block Study is considered one of the foundational studies in human development. It has produced over 100 papers and articles, of which Breslin has received several physical copies from Jack Block. Yet Breslin doubts the study’s ability to have correctly predicted the trajectory of her life, and consequently produced another piece of literature on it. Her memoir is driven by a desire to become “the author of the story of [her] life.” However, her experience as a reporter instills a need for objectivity within her, that she “inhabit a reporter’s view from nowhere” even as she describes moments of personal difficulty. Her rocky childhood, her strained relationships, her divorce, and even her trial with cancer are narrated in a cool, direct tone, sometimes to the point where she seems dispassionate toward herself. 

Her meticulous account succeeds in complicating the study in a way its founders tried to control for. The Block kids were kept in the dark by the study’s researchers and their own families about their status as human test subjects when they were younger to control for the “observer effect” — the idea that people will act differently if they know they’re being observed. But Breslin, who contends that the study itself was not a controlled variable in her life’s trajectory, also reveals she became aware that all was not as it seemed within the Block Study at a young age. The lack of power she had in this voyeuristic relationship may have led her to specialize in writing about the sex industry, work that involved crafting narratives about people who relied on people gazing at them. 

This implicit undermining of the study’s findings isn’t something Breslin herself is necessarily interested in; though she does devote time to talking about how murky the difference between good and bad research can be, she’s ultimately curious about the impact the study had on her, which lends her investigative account the personal angle needed to make it a memoir. But Breslin grapples with the tenuousness of narrative throughout her memoir — the stories we’re told and the stories we tell ourselves — and recounts how being told “science is just stories” convinced her to write her memoir. Similar to how Breslin retrospectively doubts and rewrites her memories in Data Baby is the field of psychological research itself. Famous experiments, frameworks, and diagnoses such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, Stockholm syndrome, and more have come under fire for incomplete or unusable evidence supporting them. The Rorschach test — a popular psychological test that asks people to find images in inkblots — has also come under fire for lack of evidence regarding its reliability. This same test is administered to Breslin and included as part of her data set. But perhaps most damningly is that Breslin’s data itself is bastardized. Breslin writes how during the process of investigating the Block Study, she discovered that Jack Block published someone’s uncredited research about how children’s future political ideologies could be determined from childhood characteristics. 

But it’s inaccurate to generalize this information. The Block kids were all children of university faculty and staff, meaning it was likely they were raised in liberal-leaning environments. Science as a fiction emerges; and Breslin, who describes her life as a “fable,” is decontextualized to fit a myth. “In my life,” she writes, “fact and fiction were one and the same.” She observes this after considering how she used to read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH when she was a kid, only to later realize that the fictional NIMH was based on the real National Institute of Mental Health, which conducted decades-long experiments on rats and mice. She has retrospectively found herself in a narrative she had originally not realized she was a part of, one where she was an unknowing “human lab rat,” a “human guinea pig.” If fact and fiction have merged in her life, then it’s because her life was unwillingly narrativized in a way she had no control over, a real trend that haunts her. 

When people called her “crybaby” and “piggy” as a child, Breslin refused to cry and eat excessively where she could be observed. Later, when hanging onto her marriage with an abusive husband, Breslin writes that the main hang-up she had in leaving him was a desire to not be like her divorced mother, who she knew would say “I told you so” if Breslin confirmed the nihilistic views on marriage her mother had tried to instill in her. Yet this is also paired with a need to classify her own life, hindered by the self-definitions that the Block study imposes on her. Breslin describes how as a child she took care of her mother, a phenomenon she identifies as “parentification.” When she and her ex-husband first met, she says he was “lovebombing” her. After their divorce, she diagnoses herself with “post-traumatic marriage disorder,” a term she makes up to explain her emotional state. But the labels she generates through self-psychoanalysis run up against her involvement with the Block Study. The study’s researchers and the people around Breslin never called her a “guinea pig” or a “lab rat.” Those were self-definitions, ones she repeats frequently throughout her memoir. But this is a dehumanization done deliberately, to express the indignity of knowing you’re becoming known to someone solely to be a dataset. While the Block Study wasn’t anywhere near as horrifying as the experiments that Pappworth described in his book, it still had a profound psychological effect on Breslin. 

Unlike her “lab rat ancestors,” Breslin can talk her way out of the maze. Her memoir, a reordering of her eventful life, constructs a narrative of her own design — one with handpicked data points and where the data points are memory, resisting the depersonalizing role of the “studied” that Breslin occupied for decades of her life. Susannah Breslin was indeed a data baby — twice, even. And her second time, she flaunts the role, resisting its implications and asserting her own control over it.