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
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.
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
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.
