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You might think that if you were a research subject, it would change your life, That being in a study would shape who you were, That because you are being observed, you would be compelled to become a better version of yourself then you might have otherwise. And all of that might be true. But at the same time, it might cause you to feel a great deal of internal pressure to be exceptional, to be more than who you were, to perform well inside the bell jar under which you
were trapped. Or perhaps both of these things could be true simultaneously, an increased sense of your potential and the simmering terror that you might fail to fulfill it.
That's Susannah Breslin, journalist and author of the memoir Data Baby, My life in a psychological experiment. Susanna's is a story about a childhood spent being studied, watched, in examined, and yet somehow not ever really seen. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood, the world that you were born into, and you know what kind of place that was.
I was raised in Berkeley, California, in the late sixties and seventies. My parents were intellectuals. My father taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Both my parents were English professors, and so there were a lot of books in our house.
There was a lot of encouragement of independent thinking, and there was also a sense at that time, I think that Berkeley was special, that the university was special, and that my two bright parents, who had found each other, were sort of special themselves and creating this special family, I think, is how they originally envisioned it. The house I grew up in was on a single block street in the lower tiers of the North Berkeley Hills. So
it was stucco. Initially it was pink. Later my mother painted it orange, and it was kind of a funny house. It had a lot of French doors on the first floor,
so it got a lot of light. It had a lot of sort of ornate wood carving, and then from my parents' bedroom upstairs, you got this expansive view of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gay Bridge and the Bay Bridge, and we also had an enclosed porch on the second floor that we referred to as the study, which was where my father wrote his books, so he
could often be found in there. He only ever learned you had a type with two fingers, so he would sit there and poke on the manual typewriter like a chicken pecking, and he would close the French doors that had these last panes on it. And so I would come in sometimes and see my father writing in the study and press my head against the glass, wishing I
could be with him. I think when my parents met when they were getting their PhDs in Minnesota, there was very much a sense that they were equals, and that's part of why they liked each other. They were also both incredibly tall. My father was almost sixty four and my mother was five eleven, So I think they were they had these big brains, and they were these tall people, and I think they spelt well suited in that regard. And my father got an opportunity to teach English at
UC Berkeley, so they came west. When my mother, once they were in Berkeley, accidentally got pregnant with my older sister. I think that the way she envisioned her life going and the way it actually went split into two different directions. Despite the fact that, you know, the feminist movement is in full gear at that time, and my mother was very much a feminist. The reality is she, you know, was also a mother to first my sister and then myself.
I came along about three and a half years later, and it was consuming, and it meant that my father was able to pursue an intellectual and academic life the way that he dreamed. He was at this fantastic university. He was writing books, he was producing scholarly work and teaching, and my mother was changing diapers and dealing with screaming
children and maintaining the house and shopping. I think she sed us on our budget at thirty five dollars a week, So her intellectual life suffered in support of his, which was in part more helpings were then, But I think she went along with it. But I think she was in a lot of ways bored by her domestic life and by her maternal life.
When Susannah's four years old, while her sister attends a different school, she begins preschool at the Harold F. Jones Child Study Center located at UC Berkeley. This is a very special school, and it's thrilling to her parents that she's selected to attend.
To me, it was just a preschool. It was an incredible complex, and I remember walking up this funny zigzagging ramp that takes you to this mess of concrete walkways. It was designed by this barrier architect named Joseph Esherich,
and it had mid centry modern building. It had these soaring stealings and the south facing wall was these big glass doors that you could slide, so there was a lot of ability to do what they encouraged, which was self guided play, so you could play indoors, you could go outside, and it was just this bright and wonderful place. There was a lot of things to do. They understood that, you know, children could guide themselves and learn autonomously, so there was just a lot of freedom and I remember
just being really happy there. What I didn't know at the time was that the preschool had been designed for studying children, So there was a hidden observation gallery tucked between these two bare classrooms, and researchers could go into this gallery undetected and observe the students through this mesh that had kind of an opaque screen over it. They could hear what we were saying, and they could see us playing, but we had no idea that they were there. So there was this long sort of expanse.
On the east wall where unbeknownst to me, there were researchers who were studying me and the other children who were in the same studies.
So there's a long history at the university of the children of the university's faculty and staff being studied by researchers and graduate students. Initially, this was done at this big house on one side of the campus, and so preschoolers would be studied by, say a professor who was studying early childhood development. He could go into this little shed and study the children playing in the yard. The same way another researcher in another building was studying rats
in amaze. So the studying of children at the university dates back to the late twenties. Over time, you know, they sort of professionalized it, and the idea was, let's create this preschool dedicated to this that serves both our faculty and staff who need you know, convenient quality childcare that was you know, affordable, and that also supplies us with a sort of endless stream of children who researchers
can actually come in and study them. So there's been many studies, and many researchers have studied various groups of children at the university. And it just so happened that by the time I showed up, they had created this beautiful preschool that had been outfitted just for studying kids. We would I also remember being taken out of the classroom periodically. An adult would guide me across the concrete walkway and we would go into what they called a
game room. At the time, I thought we were just playing games in a room.
Susanna's parents have signed the dotted Line, which permits her to be available as a research subject at ages three, four, five, seven, eleven, and into adulthood. When Susannah is four, this place is magical. It's just playing games in a room. But at around age six, there's a home visit, which seems a little odd to Susannah, but as many children do, she accepts the reality of the world with which she's presented a quote from the wonderful film The Truman Show, which is
also the epigraph in Susanna's memoir. The next year, however, her acceptance of this reality begins to shift. She starts to into it that there's something more going on here. There's something she's sensing but not quite seeing.
So when I was maybe seven years old, I was in one of the experiment rooms at Tolbenhall and sitting across from a table from a man who was asking me questions. I think one of the other researchers had picked me up from school and brought me there. It was right afternoon, and he was talking to me about myself. I just knew that this was a place that I was occasionally brought to. These people were very interested in me, and I think I didn't fully understand why. At a
certain point, she said, do you want some candy? And there was a bowl of Eminem's between us on the table, and I in fact was starving because it was, you know, some hours after school. But I hesitated in my response to him. I sensed at the time that maybe this was some sort of a test. I said I didn't want any candy, even though I was hungry, because I think I wanted him to think I was like a big girl. I wasn't like a little kid, you know,
who is candy? So I declined, He you know, went back to asking me these other questions, and then a few minutes later said, oh, I have to go take care of something. Do you mind waiting here while I go do that? So he left the room as soon as the door closed behind him. I leapt out of my chair and sort of dove across the table for the candy, and inadvertently knocked the bowl over in the process, which,
to my horror, sent Eminem's bouncing across the tabletop. Not wanting to be caught making a mess, I grabbed candy and stucked it into my mouth. Then suddenly I froze and I could steel my cheeks getting hot, and I looked into this mirror on the opposite wall, and I could see my cheeks were pink, and I just had this scent that there was somebody on the other side
of the mirror who was watching me. And I think that was the moment where I sort of started to understand there's more layers to this than I thought.
That's amazing. I mean, the idea that there would be somebody on the other side of the mirror must have been building somewhere, you know, in your very bright little mind to then have that thought, because why would that enter the mind of a seven year old child, there's somebody watching me. It's just really interesting that, in terms of that feeling that you had that's so so powerful, that you saw your face, you saw your red cheeks,
you flushed because you were mortified and embarrassed. But you were mortified, and we don't get mortified and embarrassed when we're alone in a room.
That's right. I don't know what figured me two sense that somebody was on the other side of the mirror. I was very sensitive. I was very aware of the beneath of the adults around me, sort of as a child, and so I don't know if it was just some sort of intuitive sense, or if as happened, sometimes the person on the other side of the mirror cocked or sneezed, or you know, the one way mirror malfunctioned a little, and I actually, you know, could see some kind of
a shadow. There are these sort of profound scenes in which all I have is the point of view of the seven year old, and I wish I knew more, but I am limited to what she knew.
We'll be right back when Susanna's mother first drops her off as a four year old at the child's study center, she says something she repeats often over the course of their lives together. I don't want to be a mother anymore. This is, of course, a stunning thing to say and a stunning thing to hear. It's also impossible, whether one wants to be a parent anymore or not. Once one has a child, they're a parent no matter what happens.
So Susanna's childhood is marked by two extremes, being raised by a mother who doesn't want to be a mother, and being observed and studied in a secret, special club for special care.
It's the home life that I had was very austere. My parents were not warm, they were not touchy feely, They were often sort of avoidant of emotional expression. I was a creative, sensitive, emotional child who I think wanted to have physical affection and a warm family environment. But that's not what I got. So I spent a lot of time in my room by myself, engaged in imaginative play, you know, playing with my dollhouse, playing with my stuffed animals,
and making up stories. My mother at a certain point started verbalizing that she didn't want to be a mother anymore, but I think long before that I sent that of her. I think when she said out loud, I don't want to be a mother anymore, what she was really saying was I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to be in this situation anymore. And I think in her mind that's reasonable. Her life had not gone the way she had wanted, and why couldn't she
want things to be another way? She wasn't the type of person who was going to sit there and think by saying I don't want to be a mother anymore, how is my child going to hear that? Because the child is going to hear my mother wishes I didn't exist. And that was in a way I tried to conform to that. Okay, I'll make myself invisible, I'll make myself scarce, but it was impossible for me to make myself completely invisible.
When Susanna's around eleven, her parents divorce. Naturally, this big life event becomes part of the study. Susannah's called in for meetings with researchers who perform a Rorschach test to try to understand how she's feeling about this new development in her family dynamic and if they could understand that, then maybe they could understand larger parts of Susanna's psychology and personality as a whole.
When Jack and Jean Block conceived of the study in the late sixties, there was this paradigm crisis in personality psychology and there were these questions around whether or not personality traits were real. Did people have these traits that shaped their behavior or was people's behavior largely informed by the situation in which they found themselves. The Blocks believed that personalities shaped human behavior and remained relatively over the
course of one's life. But that was a theory, and the only way to prove it is to study a cohort of children from childhood into adulthood. This is a herculean task, right, This is a thirty year project. It's a longitudinal study, by which its nature is that it's prone to failure. It's costly, you know, can you even make it to the finish line? And what have you
found when you get there? And so that was the intention was to have this group of kids, of which I was wanted to demonstrate that when you study the personality traits of a preschooler, you will actually have a strong sense of who that child is going to be as an adult when you come back to them twenty years later, you'll see those same personality traits over the course of my growing up life. I was, in many ways, is an ideal labrat for their experiment. They were also
interested in depression. So a teenager becomes depressed, can you if you look back at them in preschool, can you actually see signs of that depression coming? And it turns out the answer was yes. When they were studying us and our parents were getting divorced in like the late seventies and early eighties, this is coinciding with this big
divorce boom. The study has already been you know, following us for over a decade, so it really, for the first time, gave them as researchers, a front row seat to how does divorce actually affect a child? Is it, you know, is a divorce fundamentally problematic to a child? Or is it the ways in which the parents navigate the force and their own independent relationships with the children
and actually shape how the child responds to it. And another thing that they were interested in that was a fit for me when I became an adolescent was they were also interested in adolescent drug use and what the relationship was between our you know, experimenting with drugs and our mental well being. So there were a lot of ways.
In which, you know, my parents divorced, my own struggles with depression, and then the you know, experimenting with drugs and sex, sort of out of control behavior as a teenager.
It's not great for me, but for a research and there was like kids the gold mine. I really struggled a lot as a teen Once my parents got divorced, I think my world kind of imploded. My father started a new family, and my mother became terribly depressed and really didn't emerge from that depression about a decade. So I felt very much on my own.
You know.
I would go as like a fifteen year old up to UC Berkeley sprat Row and allow myself to be led off into dark rooms by frat boys who had no idea how old I was, and I was running away from home and really got myself in quite a
bit of trouble. I think that there was this kind of sea sawing or push pull because periodically I would be called by the Block study to be a set where they would occasionally send us birthday cards, or you would just get a call from them, or your parents would get a call from them, and they were just checking in to see if you're still living in the same place. They were checking their contact information. So the study, you know, was periodically a part of my life, but
it was always sort of in my head. You know, I have these sort of absent minded professor parents, but I also have this kind of third parent, which was the study that I knew was following my life and had been for over a decade at that point, that was interested in who I was, that was keeping track of who I was, and that gave me a sense of myself as special. I am part of something bigger than myself. At that time, you know, I sort of know that I'm in a study. There's these other kids
in the study. I don't know who they are, but we're all part of this research that's somehow going to you know, benefit humanity in terms of understanding how people become who they are, and that was meaningful to.
Me years past. And the study continues. Susanna navigates adolescence under the watch of what feels like three very complicated parents, Mom, dad, and the study. But sometimes it seems like the study is the only one really watching where her parents, especially her mother, are less involved in her life. Her teenage years are fraught and reckless, but during college she develops
an interest in writing. This bullies her and connects her to her parents in a way intellectuals that they are perhaps pursuing a career in writing and journalism is a way to get her parents approval or at the very least, their attention. In nineteen ninety six, Susanna's father suddenly dies. Susannah is twenty seven, embarking on her life as a writer. When this asteroid hits, she seeks a distraction, a vocation, something besides grief to fill her up.
When my father died, I was really devastated. We have had a complicated relationship, but I felt like I knew my father at least liked me, which was not really the sense that I got from my mother. So when my father died suddenly of a heart attack, it just exploded my brain and I struggled a lot mentally. I had anxiety attacks, and at the same time, I think I had felt intimidated by the fact that my father
was an English professor and a writer of books. And when he died it kind of opened up place for me to step into my own as a writer, having just graduated from a writing program where I'd gotten a master's and you know, I was looking for something to write about that was interesting and that it also on an emotional level, would allow me to escape from the unhappiness I felt in the wake of my father's death. I didn't want to think about hand lying dead on
the floor. I wanted to think about anything but that. And within about a year of him dying, I ended up going to San Francisco with a girlfriend and we went into a strip club on Broadway, and it was totally fascinating to me to see this group of men that focused on this woman dancing on the stage. It was very voyeuristic, and it was all about people who were seeing and people were being seen. And I think there's a way in which that resonated for me as
somebody who grew up being studied, being looked at. I was, you know, the child and the teenager and the young adult who people were looking at and considering. I was always the thing, the subject. I wasn't the one asking the questions, I was the one answering them. And when I found this sort of subterraine in sex world, in all its complexity, that I could write about and go through and be distracted from all the bad things in life.
It was just a kind of revelation. And I was the one who was doing the looking, and I was the one who was asking the questions. So it was a way for me to sort of invert that paradigm from a passive position into an active position.
This world becomes Susanna's beat as a journalist. One night, she goes to see the porn star Jenna Jamison dance at the Legendary of Pharaoh Theater in the Bay Area. Jenna's publicist invites Susanna to come visit one of the porn movie sets if she ever finds herself in La. Susanna does just that and falls in love with La. She stays for several years and becomes fascinated by the
porn world. She dedicates herself to the porn beat, writes hundreds of compelling pieces about sex and the adult movie industry.
The author Martin Amos once referred to the porn industry as a rough trade, and I think it is. It's a complicated place, but it's it's like there's a difference between having a chicken on your plate and going to the slaughterhouse where they kill the chickens. And I think seeing how porn got made and sort of what that did to people was a lot for me to look at.
You know, Intellectually, it was fascinating, but it was sort of a rough place to be, and I think it became something that I kind of got burned out on. It made me feel negative about, you know, what people's human interests are when you kind of remove the constraint of polite society and see what people do when there's no rules at all, which is how the porn industry can feel at times. You see people do bad things to other people. So I think that took a toll on me. As we got older, I had less of
a connection to the study. When we were thirty two, they wanted to do the final assessments of us, but they couldn't afford to, you know, bring us all back to Berkeley to be assessed in person, so they sent us these huge questionnaires for us to fill out that echoed a lot of what they had been asking us over the years, and so I dutifully filled mine out, and I think I sort of felt like, you know, I hope they think I turned out okay, they don't
think I'm too too far out to the left. The study had been a part of my life for thirty years, which lives longer than my relationship with my father, right and father died when I was twenty seven, but it's not until I'm thirty two that the study ends, So the sense that that was coming to an end, I think it is bittersweet for me.
Eventually, Susannah burns out on covering the porn industry in LA. She moves to New Orleans. Then two years later, Hurricane Katrina decimates the city. Of course, this catastrophe is all over the news. Susanna's mom knows she's living in New Orleans, and even though they're not close, even though her mom doesn't want to be a mother, still Susannah is stung that her mother doesn't call it a check and make
sure she's okay. For Susannah, this is a breaking point, the ruin all around her and the ruin of a relationship with her mom.
It became clear about forty eight hours before that Hurricane Katrina was just going to be unlike anything that had come before it, and I was able to get out of the city in time. I think the first bands were hitting as we were still trying to get away from the city, and it was harrowing to think about what would have happened if I had remained in New Orleans and I fled to Baton Rouge with a bunch
of other refugees I didn't know. And during that time period, my mother never called to see if I was alive, and eventually I connected with my sister who said my mother had not called her either to see if I was alive. At this point, the city has flooded. It is on every you know channel on TV. It's hard to mince and I just could not. I was livid and could not understand how she could leave me for dead.
Ye.
At the same time, this is not out of character, right, I don't want to be a mother anymore. Is this sort of passive aggressive way of her saying I wish you didn't exist and yours?
You know?
It seemed like she wished that I would just disappear, like the hurricane would just consume me, and she would be released from motherhood at least in part and I just essentially cut off contact with her. At that point, it seemed like maintaining a relationship with Hurricane at an incredibly high cost, and the cost was all mine to pay. It was extremely difficult for me to go no contact
with her. My belief about what happened is that I actually paved my mother exactly what she wanted when I went no contact with her, and that it was actually still complying with what she wanted. So I don't know that it made things easier for her, but it may have.
Will be back in a moment with more family secrets. Susannah leaves New Orleans and moves to Chicago. She's in her thirties. She doesn't have much of a family, she's estranged from her mother, doesn't really have a relationship with her sister, and isn't in a romantic relationship either. So she goes on a dating app without particularly high hopes.
I went out on a date with a guy who I thought seemed moderately interesting. I couldn't discern whether or not he was interested in me, and kind of wrote it off as possibly a one off. He asked me out again A few days later. I went out again. We spent that day together going around Chicago, and spent the night with him, then spent the weekend with him, and I think fell in love with him very quickly. And so when he asked me nine days after our first date if I wanted to go to Las Vegas
that weekend and get married, I thought, why not. I'm not getting any younger, and I didn't have kids and with their derby, and so Offrey went and got married in the same chapel on the south end of the Vegas Strip where Angelina had married Billy Bob Thornton. I believe with the vile of the blood around her neck, right, I remember that. You know, I was forty three by
the time. And part of the reason for that was that my mother had said as far back as I can remember, probably starting around after my father left, she would say, never get married, you like Gloria's Dina. Never get married. She stopped saying that when Gloria's dne and got married, but her idea was, you know, men just sort of kill your life. They want you to take care of them, but they don't want to take care of you. And I sort of followed that missive for
a long time, and then got married very quickly. I was diagnosed with breast cancer four days after I got married. It was very early stage, but it was a type of breast cancer that was more rare and more aggressive, and the type of cancer troubled the various doctors that I spoke to. So things went very quickly from being Oh, my god, I've met the love of my life and I'm married. Look at the ring on my finger, to uh, you know, am I going to have to have bulk
my breast removed? Am I going to survive this? Do I have to do temo? Then I'll be bald? This is like a nightmare. Once I am told I have this raar and aggressive type of breast cancer, it becomes clear to being very quickly that I am of great interest to the oncologists who I'm coming into contact with. I assume that they spend their day is just dealing with boring, garden variety breast cancers. So when somebody shows up with some unique kind then you're of interest to them.
They have, you know, their own research that they're doing and maybe you fit into that. So I was, you know, in this private room getting my chemo dose pumped into me, high on benz Adreen or whatever I was on, and an oncologist who wasn't my own collegist knocked on the door. He says, hey, I've got my interns today. Can we come in and I'm going to present your pace to them. So everyone files in, you know, in their little white jackets and staring at me, and they're in this half
circle and he starts going over my case. They're asking me questions about, you know, my diagnosis and sort of remarking to each other about it. And I think that that very much resonated with me. This is not weird. This is totally familiar to me. This is exactly like when I was being studied, when I list in those experiment rooms of a kid in Tolman Hall. I am now a human lab rat for the second time in my life. Who would have thunk?
And that really seems like it brought the study back to you in this way. It had, as you said, it had receded into the background, because after age thirty two, you had graduated out of the study. You know, that third parent was also gone, and yet now it felt like it had come back with some real questions for you. Yeah, you know, if you studied a kid, could you predict
who that kid would grow up to be? Were the clues to who you became, or at least who you had become at that juncture in your life in your early forties? Was that always there? Could that have been predicted?
I think until I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I'd had a pretty charmed life. Help wise, I had had not a single other major health issue in my life other than kidney stones. I'd never even broken a bone. So colliding in this very extreme way with something that you know was causing all these doctors concerned, was you know, making me sergeants open up my body and remove parts
of myself? Was this head on collision with facing my own mortality and conjured up all those questions people have when they find themselves in those situations, which is who am I? What have I done? Is this who I was supposed to be? You know, I'm this bald, incapacitated person who is unclear if I'm going to make it through the next couple of years. You know, based on a mathematical equation that my oncologist keeps running through his brain.
And I really forced me to take a look at who I was and how I had gotten there, and if I made it through this, what was I going to do with that opportunity, because obviously I wanted to make it through it. It wasn't really until we subsequently moved to Florida so my then husband could pursue work opportunity that these questions became even more cute and immediate. I was told I was cancer free, and I was
happy to be that way. But I was living in a you know, plan development in southwest Florida, you know, behind a gate and a housemaid of cinder blocks, what is not working a lot. My husband was the breadwinner, and there was this view beyond our backyard pool of this man made lake that would periodically shoot a stream of water into the air. And it was so far
flong from how I thought I would end up. You know, I had grown up in Berkeley, you know, the child of academics, and I was in the study that made me feel like, ah, you know that, like my life is sort of unique, special, this is promising. And then I'm just in Florida playing a supporting role in what feels like the story of someone else's life, story of the person I was married to and then I'm really started to think about the study and think it must
have kept a file on me. There must be a file in some cabinet at UC Berkeley that had all this data about me. Did they foresee who I would become? Is there are there answers to the questions that I have that are locked in the study. I'm a journalist. I can find what they knew about me. Can that shed some light on how I understand myself? Yeah?
That was such an extraordinary part of your story is that you have the skills, you know, you have a long career as a journalist that enables you to do essentially the detective work that you need to do.
Yeah. So when I was in Florida, I sort of start to investigate the study and figure out what the story is behind the study. And by searching the block study online, I uncovered that there's an archive at Harvard that has some of the data from our study, and I'm able to access this data online. It was padlocked,
but I was given permission to access the data. And it's really by digging around in the data that I'm able to sort of triangulate various sort of data points about myself to identify my sort of number in the study, or my code name in the study. To protect our anonymity, the study had given each one of the participants three digit number, and I was able to figure out that I was seven fifty eight, which was a really strange experience. I come to this thinking, yeah, study, you know, I'm
very special to them. They're very special to me. They're kind of like this third parent. This is this meaningful part of how I understand myself, and in many ways I shaped the story of my life. But I'm actually just a number. Perhaps I was not special at all. I was actually just a data point, because that's what
that looks like here. And that became part of a different way of understanding myself and relationship to the study, which was, you know, sort of like the researcher's point of view, where this is not so much a child, but a bucket of data from which I, the scientist, will extract the information that I need. And it did cause me to rethink some of my experiences in the study.
For example, when I was an adolescent, I was telling my researchers things that my parents didn't know, like drugs, you know that I was experimenting with and people that I was having sex with, and the study knew those things, and I knew that, and there had been no intercession by them. Now, that wasn't their job, right. They were there to observe my life, not step in and change it.
But it did make me feel more like the relationship with the study had been fundamentally transactional, and that I had offered up my data on a plate to an entity that had consumed it and used it for its own purposes which were not necessarily aligned. In twenty fifteen, I thought, you know, I've got to go to California and go back to the place where the study started, the place where my life started, and start seeing what
I can find there. The first thing I did after I left the airport was I drove past the hospital in Oakland where I was born, and then from there I drove to Berkeley, where I went to the Child Study Center and stood in front of it, and a guy walked out of the building and was walking towards me, and I called out to him and said, are you
a teacher here? And he was walking down the ram in front of me at that point like didn't look at me and shook his head, and then he sort of gave me a wide berth on the sidewalk and was starting to walk away towards campus, and I called after him, are you a researcher? And he stopped and he turned around halfway towards me, and I said I was one of the kids who had studied here, and he looks at me and then he says, yeah, a
lot of you come around here. And I thought, it's like we're these little ghostly specters, like hovering around this place where you know, something happened to us that we don't fully understand. So I knew that I had a story, and I knew that there were other people who had shared in that experience, and that there was a way this sense of like you're just the subject. It was almost like being told that again, like we're the researchers.
You don't you don't really get to access what we're doing, but we get to access everything that's going on in your brain.
During this same trip, Susannah also arranges to see her mother for the first time in a decade, but this isn't a visit to reconnect. It's a formal interview. There's a tape recorder in between the two of them. When Susanna asks her mother why she'd put her in the study, her mother replies, well, I just wanted more time for myself. She said, she wanted to finish her pH d. She wanted to read books, she wanted to be doing something other than parenting.
So I think that this study in a way for her was a kind of babysitter. And so it also sort of made sense that it sort of had this parental element in my life. It was pop to look back at my life and see how much of the influence came from people who are all all brains and low in heart, you know. And it was kind of like, I'm the person you get when you allow a human child to be raised by robots, you know, get this sort of hyper intellectual thing that like find meaning in
life by being studied by researchers. It's a just weird.
It strikes it strikes me that they didn't exercise the heart out of you.
Yeah, my whole life. I thought it was my father's idea that i'd be put into the study, that he thought I was special, that his putting me in the study was sort of evidence of that. And I don't know that that's not true, because when I showed up and said to my mother, now, whose idea was it to put me in the study? And she says, oh, it was mine. I don't know if that's true. It's very in line with like my mother would seek to
co opt any narrative she encountered that centered herself. So obviously at that point my father was dead, I couldn't ask him. It's still a bit of a mystery as to whose idea it was, or or maybe it was both of theirs. Don't really know.
Was that the last time you saw your mother?
It was.
My mother, by and large, was an unhappy person the last time I saw her. She seemed unhappy. At that time, I was unhappily married, and I certainly saw from stunding time with my mother that if I didn't do something, I was going to end up like her, unhappy forever. And I did not want to spend any more time living any more of my life being unhappy, especially since I had had breast cancer and the future was uncertain. It felt like, you know, time was imperative. You know,
this unspooled over a much longer period of time. But I think just a sense that things must be better than this situation that I found myself in. I was able to sort of with that belief project myself out of the marriage and back to California, the place where everything had started. So after my marriage, I moved back
to Los Angeles, which I like because it's warm. And then I heard about this program, the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, where you could work for them, be on campus for a year as an academic fellow while pursuing your investigative project. And I thought, God, that just sounds perfect for what I want to do. I would be on campus, I would have access to things I wouldn't have other wine, and this is just like going back to the epicenter at the original earthquake. I want
to get this. At the same time, I didn't, and frankly still don't view myself as a serious investigative journalist, you know. Interest think of that as like a guy in a fedora for some reason. And so I didn't think I was going to get it, but did, and it just felt like something I had to pursue. And so I moved back to Berkeley to research this study in Berkeley for a year and moved into a in law apartment of a house that was, you know, less than a mile from the house in which I grew up.
I'm a big believer in like immersion journalism, so being able to embed myself into, you know, the place where the book took place was important to me. I like to kind of live the story.
Yeah, well, you're like living the story of the story that you had lived. There's so many layers to it. And it also seems that getting the fellowship finally gives you the permission really to actually do the research.
Yeah. So when I moved back to Berkeley, I was given part of a shared cubicle to work at, you know, and I set up my computer and I'm you know, I'm around all these people, you know, a Pulitzer, they write for important newspaper. There's all these important work being found here. And I sort of sat down to sort of work on this project writing it, and was as
steinied there as I had ever been before. But what being there allowed me to do, I think three days after I got there, was to walk out the front door, across the street, down this wooded path on campus, across a bridge, over a river, up a hill, and stand on a rise where I could look at Tolman Hall, which coincidentally was empty and was about to be torn down over the exact period that I would be pursuing
this s fellowship here. And I knew when I saw that, and when the guy and maintenance handled me a tee to the building so I could come and go as I please, that this one just an incredible opportunity for me to be able to go and revisit let somebody else refer to as a memory palace, to walk through the memory palace and sort of understand the story that way, before I got the key, I was able to sneak in to Tolman Hall and walk into rooms where I was now where the researchers had been on the other
side of the one way mirror, and I could look into and stand in the very experiment rooms where I had been studied, and that sort of broke open the story for me in a way that wouldn't have been possible any other way. Finding my data from the study
was more complicated than that. At a certain point I was able to track down my file from the preschool, and what should actually had to get somebody else's permission to access my own data but part of what was in that file was a whashler I believe it called IQ test that I I had been given when I was about four, and where I could see myself attempting to fill out these mazes, to draw this line between a baby chick and the mother hen who are separated
by this maize. Through these series of increasingly complicated mazes, I'm able to follow the line. But in the last maze, which is the most complicated, I watched the pencil line where I'm trying to find my way through the maize, and a certain point I'd just give up.
You really can't make this stuff up. On Susannah's third attempt with the maze, she finds no path from the baby chick to her mother. She simply can't find her way out. The metaphor here is breathtaking.
When I was a little kid, cried a lot. My sister used to call me a cry baby, and I was, you know, I think, anxious and sad and lonely.
And when I got through my adolescence and became an adult, I'm six 's one and became a journalist, and I kind of created a persona where I was, you know, this sort of unblinking.
I don't give a shit. I'll go places where no one else will go. I'm a daredevil. I write these stories nobody else can get. Kind of a badass. And when I went back to look at my own true story of my life, I had to look at that little girl that I was, and that was agonizing forward me to see this sad, lonely, ignored, vulnerable child who clings to a study like it's sometime I love substitute parent. It is a kind of tragic story, and really there is no point at which someone sort of steps in
to save her. Although you know, if you believe time at a flat circle, I do come home as an adult to bear witness to the child that I was. So in a way, I am creating my own observer effect by going back and looking at what happened, and in perhaps in some way by just seeing the truth
of what happened, I'm transforming myself in the process. But it was really difficult, especially in regards to my mother, to admit and face how damaging her lack of maternalness towards me hadn't been and how she had never fixed it. That was something that I just had tried not to look at the story of the relationship between my mother and I is an American tragedy. It's just complicated. You know.
She was smart, and she was feminist, and she was driven, and a lot of those things are great, but they've also had really negative consequences for a little girl that I was. It's incredibly difficult for me to talk about that little girl that I was, to share that story, to put that story out in the world.
There were the specifics of your life, your particular father, your particular mother, the way that they were, the sort of emotional paucity of the way that you grew up, you know. And then there's the question posed by the block study, which is, you know, if you study a kid, can you predict who that kid will grow up to be?
Yeah, even though I spent thirty years as a willing research subject, I sort of disagree fundamentally with even the concept of the block study, which is that a person can be understood as a constellation of data points, that by studying another human being you can somehow know them in their totality and even potentially foresee their entire life path or who they will become. And I think that there is something about people that is beyond the grasp
of science, that science doesn't take into account. And I think there is something in myself that was beyond the studies grasp, which was sort of a will to survive all of these different things that I encountered. And they didn't fully appreciate how much studying me would shape my life and who I have become. And so in a way, I don't know how they can answer the question when by studying us they have played a role in shaping our lives.
Here's Susannah reading one last passage from data Baby.
A long time ago, in a city nicknamed Berserkly, we the cohort, were children. Our parents were professors and mail carriers, architects and bus drivers, civil servants and housewives. We were of different races, classes and ethnicities, raised Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, or to be non believers, the daughters and sons of people who, by chunts or choice, happened to be living in the Bay Area. In the nineteen sixties. We were
at ground zero of the free speech movement. As the civil rights movement and the feminist movement spread across the land. We were the kids prophesied in Free to Be You and Me, a nineteen seventy two album produced by Marla Thomas and the Msfoundation for Women that promotes gender equality, tolerance, and the radical notion that anyone can achieve anything, the title track of which foreshadows a land in which the children are free.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.