Split: A Counterculture Childhood

Books have been written about the sixties from the perspective of its student radicals, but Split: A Counterculture Childhood is the first book to offer a child's-eye view of the counterculture and protest movements. Michaels notably resists the typical parent-bashing slant of most childhood memoirs. Phillip Lopate singled out Split for its "calm refusal to blame family members or indulge in self-pity." James Atlas included an excerpt from Split as the lead piece in his special "memoir" issue of the New York Times Magazine (May 1996).

In 1969, Lisa Michaels's father was sentenced to two years in prison for his part in an antiwar protest. Lisa was three years old and had recently been captured in Life magazine carrying a Vietcong flag at an antiwar rally. Her parents divorced, and she spent the early seventies touring the country with her mother and stepfather in a customized mail truck-complete with oriental rugs, fold-down beds, and a woodstove-until they settled in a small northern California town to grow vegetables.

In Split, Michaels writes clearly about the pressures and freedoms of her childhood: about outhouses, communes, and demonstrations, and about consecrating her father and stepmother's marriage by reading from the Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. She also looks at what came after, for her parents and herself, as the wild days of the seventies gave way to the Reagan era. Split highlights the effects of such contemporary domestic staples as divorce, when a child is "split" between two very different families. Her perspective is partly social and political, but primarily emotional. An award-winning poet, Michaels's first concern is the evocative and visual quality of her story. She doesn't offer pat conclusions about this complicated era; instead, she paints a clear-eyed, insightful picture of the way her upbringing shaped her, and of how the legacy of the sixties played out in one remarkable family.

Praise for Split