Split

New Yorker

This account of being raised by sixties radicals may be the best argument for the left since Marx. The facts at first sound otherwise: tot at demo with Vietcong flag loses dad to prison for his antiwar activities, gets dragged around the country with mom's new boyfriend, etc. But the signal fact is that these parents, separated from and resentful of each other, treated their child with same absolute attentiveness, respect, and unreserved sympathy that they had hoped everyone in the world could share.

Adam Goodheart

Split is an intelligent and vivid memoir of what it was like to be literally a child of the '60s. Lisa Michaels has a remarkably perceptive eye, and she seems to have noticed things about her parents' generation that her parents' generation was too busy to notice about itself. -- New York Times Book Review

Jon Garelick

Memoir doesn't require trauma. Larry Rivers' edgy rebop about trying to find a way to be an artist, Tobias Wolff's reflections on being a noncombatant schnook of a junior officer in Vietnam, John Berger's writing about cleaning his outhouse -- like good fiction, memoirs can transform ordinary experience just as they often redeem pain.

Amid the noise and haste of current memoirists, Lisa Michaels is one of the quiet ones. Family trauma is scaled down in this 32-year-old poet and essayist's first book. No raging alcohol and drug abuse here, no schizophrenic siblings, no parental abuse sexual or otherwise, no wild bipolar binges of self-destruction. And despite the analysis implied in the title, Michaels' boomer parents get off pretty easy. There are no grand proclamations, no calls for apology from one generation to another. In fact, when all is said and done, she likes her folks just fine.

Michaels' parents were political activists. When she was 3, her father, an SDS Weatherman, was busted for taking part in a violent demonstration at Harvard and began a two-year prison sentence. By the time he got out of jail, Michaels' parents had split. The child was soon off on a cross-country journey with her mother and new stepfather in a converted mail truck. The book follows Michaels up and down California as she travels between two sets of parents (and multiple step-siblings), all of them seeming to be constantly on the move. Then on to all-too-typical college ennui, an unwanted pregnancy, a postgraduate trip to India and a kind of enlightenment.

Despite any hardships and family eccentricities, there's nothing on its surface that's extraordinarily dramatic about Michaels' story. Reading it, you might be tempted to invert Tolstoy's maxim: All dysfunctional divorced families are pretty much alike, arduous visitation commuting and the child who "acts out" included. "I envied her for stealing my father away," Michaels writes of her kind, not-nearly-evil stepmother, "and she envied me for having come first, as no child should, and because he kept a special place for me -- the lost child who stayed lost." When young Lisa makes herself a "tea party" with gasoline, it's more an accident than the result of abusive neglect.

Michaels doesn't have the honed novelistic reflexes of a Wolff -- her perspective drifts, and her hindsight speculations clumsily break up the unity of potentially sustained dramatic scenes. It's not that we can't believe she would remember detailed dialogue from the age of 6; it's that she doesn't sustain the kind of narrative illusion that would let us suspend disbelief. Her father and stepfather are often indistinguishable from each other -- vague, stoic, male presences. But for all the clumsy passages and discursive nattering, Michaels' intelligence comes through. There are some wonderfully lyric passages of realization, a small section about discovering Brecht in college that's as strong as any character description in the book and a great, surprising moment when she's caught shoplifting virtually in front of her Marxist auto-plant-worker and labor-organizing father. And her soul-searching Indian trip offers gratifying conventional suspense. Split isn't a great book. But it introduces you to a writer with whom you want to stay in touch. -- Salon

Library Journal

As a kid she slept on the engine block of a renovated mail truck, moved back and forth between her earthy and wise mother and her political activist father, and lived the cultural shifts of the 1970s and 1980s as an only child of "counterculture" parents. In this memoir, Michaels, a poet and contributing editor at Threepenny Review, cleverly wends her way through the complicated terrain of divorce, stepfamilies, and her ever-present struggle to feel at one with the world and with her family. Ultimately, she finds herself in possession of precious autonomy, deep and abiding attachment to people around her, and a vivid imagination. Michaels may not possess years of experience (she was born in 1966), but what she's lived makes an excellent portrait of the product of a unique generation. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/98.]--Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

A memoir about growing up as the daughter of a radical father and a hippie mother—but mostly just about growing up. The author was born in 1966 to parents deeply involved in the Zeitgeist. Her father spent two years in jail as a member of the radical Weathermen underground. Michaels, a contributing editor at the Threepenny Review, a literary journal, spent a pre-kindergarten year on the road with her mother and stepfather, living out of a mail van, before settling down to an alternative lifestyle in northern California.

But having Central-Casting '60s parents doesn't by itself make for a riveting life story, and a short way into this memoir, it strikes the reader that there's really nothing of enormous consequence to Michaels' life. Even her parents come across as straighter than might have been expected: Her father stayed a radical longer than most of his contemporaries, but there's no mention of drugs in their lives, and very little sex. Michaels is really just striving to fit the description her grandmother offers of her mother: 'She could take a casual day and make it interesting.' Sometimes Michaels fails: The days are just too casual, the happenings too trivial, to carry the weight Michaels tries to give them. Sometimes she succeeds, using vivid memories of growing up, being shuttled back and forth between divorced parents, going to college, trekking through Nepal, reflecting on life, love, and loss.

And if at times she seems perilously close to slipping into the maudlin, especially as she describes her years of simmering, subconscious anger at her father for leaving her and going to jail, Michaels' finely crafted, lucid prose saves her from going overthe edge. A decent autobiography, but a good—sometimes excellent—essay that reflects the counterculture less by the happenings it describes than by the intensity and honesty with which it is written.