Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Publication date: 11/7/23

The premise of this memoir sounded really interesting to me. I was a psychology minor and was intrigued by this longitudinal study following children through adulthood.

While I enjoyed the beginning of the memoir, it soon veered into a lot of what I consider unrelated stories about the author's life. And yes, this would've been appropriate if the stories/experiences were later tied into the study findings, but they really weren't. I was hoping this book would delve much more in depth to the actual study, her memories of being a participant, and the findings. Really, she only touched on these issues and doesn't seem to remember a lot.

One thing I found really annoying with the author's writing style was her constantly over-explaining basic concepts/cultural and media references. For example: she writes "when all the 'snowbirds'--those who spent the spring and summer up north and the fall and winter in Florida..." Or when she'd explain ideas that should already be obvious to an average reader: "I was blocked, which struck me as fitting, seeing as my name of the study had foretold my predicament (Block Project| blocked)". There were also instances where the author would write descriptions that could've been edited much tighter: "hung my clothes in the bedroom closet and my coats in the hall closet, and bought groceries that I put in the refrigerator and canned goods that I arranged in neat lines in the kitchen cabinets."

While I think there were many sections that the author wrote well, overall, this was a bit of a disappointment for me. I think there was a lot of potential here, but think this would've worked better as a short story/essay.

DATA BABY is a book that doesn’t know what it wants to be. The premise sells it as an expose of this radical-seeming “human-subject study” of the 1960s and its (presumably) deleterious lifelong effects on the author, who was enrolled in the study by her parents as a pre-schooler. Instead, not only was she *not* negatively affected (or affected in any way, really), but we don’t even get to find out if her childhood personality predicted the person she would become because all of the files from the study were, SPOILER ALERT, destroyed! That’s the big reveal, and it’s a very meh one. I can imagine a book in which this type of true event would feel like karma, or one of those “stranger than fiction” real-life quirks, but it’s not this book. This book is a memoir comprised of lists of things that happened with zero emotional buy-in and a rather unrelatable narrator. She had some interesting things happen to her, any of which would have made for a good book on their own if explored in depth. She was a journalist who covered the sex industry. She married her husband nine days after meeting him. When these things are lumped together though with no clear through-line, the whole thing falls flat. I wanted a lot more from this story than it delivered. Thanks to the publisher for an ARC!

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started this and I'm glad it was more of an autobiography because I was really invested in the story of her life and then then the sections of the study, instead of it being all about the study.

I will say that Susannah was absolutely correct in saying she would have rather done this NOT as a memoir - I feel like she could have done so much more with what she had to say if she didn’t feel like she had to write it as a typical memoir is. Yes, she was studied, but she didn’t even truly know the depth of it until she was older, and even then she never found out everything because it wasn’t preserved. The parallels between the study and the way we live now with technology always monitoring us were super fascinating, and I felt like that was more of what she was trying to explain in a way that isn’t as potent in a memoir. Because the similarities between her fairly covert and emotionally detached participation in the study and the way we nonchalantly accept being data mined and observed today are so extreme and so unable to be ignored.

I was really interested in the premise of this book. It felt like a real life Truman Show, with psychologists studying and manipulating our heroine for 30 years. In reality, it read like an extremely detached memoir of a mostly ordinary (rather depressing) life. Yes, she was studied from an early age but it was mostly being watched from the other side of a glass while playing at preschool and having to answer a bunch of questions every few years.

Toward the end of the book, Breslin says that when her book proposal was accepted they stipulated that they wanted a memoir instead of the journalistic piece she envisioned. That makes sense now but I didn’t particularly enjoy it as a memoir because she writes with such complete lack of emotion that it felt off putting and I had no emotional connection to her. I started out in the same area of California at the same time and was even a similar child, but her detachment in telling her story meant that it was like reading an incredibly long web article or Wikipedia entry, except with an excruciating amount of detail like what her coffee mug looked like.

In the end (no spoilers really), everything just felt pointless and empty. Breslin is a good writer but I’m just sort of sad after reading this.

I read a digital advance copy of this book for review.

This one will become a classic. It was well written and well researched. Everyone will be talking about this book in the future.