Split: a counterculture childhood

Description

In Split, Lisa Michaels offers a strikingly textured portrait of her days of communes and road trips, of antiwar protests and rallies - and of what came after, for her parents and for herself - as the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to conservative times. As a young child, Lisa visited her father in prison, where he was serving a two-year sentence for his part in an antiwar protest. In the early '70s, she toured the country with her mother and stepfather in a customized mail truck complete with Oriental rugs and a wood stove, until the family settled in a small northern California town.;Observant, luminous, and wry, Split captures both the vulnerability and heady freedom of a counterculture childhood.;Not surprisingly, Lisa grew up craving conformity - giving her mother makeovers and arranging their secondhand furniture in inspired ways - but she also came to share many of the values her parents held dear: independence, frankness, and unsparing self-examination. In the buttoned up world of UCLA during the Reagan years, she went through a hippie revival phase, wearing batik dresses and Chairman Mao pins, a throwback amid the campus's Greek revivalists and young Republicans. Against that traditional backdrop, her parents' longtime activism took on new meaning, and at twenty-two, Michaels embarked on a trip through Asia, very much in the spirit of her upbringing.