Where It All Began

And other myths

Aug 17, 2023

Yesterday I was heading home from an appointment, and I happened to drive by this apartment building where I used to live in Los Feliz, which is a neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles. I moved in around 1998, I believe, and I had a one-bedroom on the top floor in the back. I think my rent peaked during the five years I spent there at $700; these days, the units rent for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,300. In any case, I write about this place in my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. My book is in part about a well-known University of California, Berkeley longitudinal study of personality in which I was a research subject from early childhood and well into adulthood, but it also examines how being studied shaped my identity and my life choices, including playing a role in why I became a journalist. As Kirkus Reviews put it in a review of my book: “From observed subject, she became ‘the voyeur,’ which was ‘intoxicating.’” As a child, I was spied on (think: me, in an observation room with a researcher standing on the other side of a one-way mirror); as an adult, I became a spy (think: me, notebook in hand, observing a scene from the view from nowhere). I thought about these things as I stood in front of where I used to live and how all these factors had changed the story of my life, and then as I went to go back to my car, I pulled out my phone and clicked the home button on the map app, which seemed like the very definition of having moved on.

The Reverse Cowgirl

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