Pages: 224
Format: book
Buy the Book: Amazon
Goodreads: What if your parents turned you into a human lab rat on the day you were born? Would that change the story of your life? Would 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 128 children who are research subjects in an unprecedented 30-year psychological experiment that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in an abusive marriage to a man with a violent history and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped the person she became and her life choices. Is she the narrator of the story of her life—or is something else? Already a successful journalist, whose published work has appeared in Forbes, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Bazaar, she decides to make her own curious history the subject of her next investigation and embarks on a life-changing journey that will expose the dark secrets hidden behind the renowned longitudinal study of personality development that she grew up believing knew her better than she knew herself.
Kritters Thoughts: Susannah Breslin grew up in California and with two very academic professors as parents, they enrolled her into this long-term research project where her and her life were observed and theories were made based on her reaction to tests and to life itself. Essentially Susannah and many of her peers across the country were lab rats and their response to various tests were used to make predictions on what kind of adults they would become and the life they would end up with.
Maybe spoiling it a bit, the last chapter was it for me. While Susannah was a lab rat, aren't we all now with big tech tracking our every moves through google searches, phone analytics and gps. It made me remind myself that for sure the instagram and facebook ads are targeted and know exactly what I am shopping for or what life issues I need solved (dog hair in laundry!). So maybe in the end we are all being tracked and companies are predicting the life that we want and the products that will best get us there!
A quick little memoir that really made me think about the quality of research and had me pondering all of those personality tests that affirmed what I was already thinking about myself.
Rating:
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received one copy of this book free of charge from Legacy Lit. I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own.
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