Yearning for a Childhood That Was Never in Her Reach

“Split” is an anti-”Ice Storm.” In the latter, 29-year-old novelist Rick Moody presented a none-too-affectionate portrait of affluent suburban America in the 1970s--its obsession with appearance, its hypocritical marriages, its arid, alienated families. In “Split,” 31-year-old memoirist Lisa Michaels tells the story of her “counterculture childhood”--its communes and demonstrations; its shifting, sometimes dissolving relationships; its stress on experience, authenticity and change. Did any of this make her happier than the fictional adolescents of Moody’s frozen world? Well, not exactly.

Michaels’ mom, Ann, is a hippie earth mother who rejects “the manicured world she had come from” and considers Molly Bloom’s soliloquy the perfect sex ed tool. Her father, Carl, is a dedicated political activist (Weatherman, Maoist, labor organizer). He applies “criticism, self-criticism” exercises to the domestic sphere (sample categories: excellent, good, blah, yech) and bluntly tells his daughter that “keep[ing] everything safe and stable” is not his job. Both parents believe that Michaels should judge for herself “life’s lights and mysteries.” And both are idealists: “My father identified with the oppressed,” Michaels writes. “It was fury at their conditions that spurred him on. . . . My mother was attuned to other people’s suffering, but what drove her to action was the idea that reason could win out.”

Michaels’ childhood--much of it spent in a ramshackle house in a small Northern California town--might sound idyllic to the denizens of Moody’s world. But “Split” is not a happy book. Michaels’ parents divorce when she is an infant; in 1969, when she’s 3, her father is jailed for his part in an antiwar demonstration. The family shatters, but it also re-creates itself: Ann marries a gentle, patient man named Jim; Carl, after spending almost two years in prison, reassumes his role in Michaels’ life and eventually marries a smart, caring woman named Leslie. Nonetheless, Michaels experiences a permanent sense of endangerment, envisioning herself as “space junk from a marriage that barely was. . . . I was the free electron, bouncing back and forth between clusters.”

It’s not just her parents’ divorce and her father’s (albeit temporary) disappearance that Michaels can’t abide. She becomes obsessed with the very accouterments of the “American Dream . . . full of holes” that her parents have so vigorously rejected: “Somewhere along the way, I had become a great materialist,” Michaels writes. “Neither of my two families . . . was much concerned with image. . . . I had a fixation with status that made up for the both of them.”

She yearns for a suburban tract home and worries that her freedom-loving mother doesn’t look “varnished” enough. She’s mortified that her family doesn’t own a TV (her mother and Jim prefer to read). She longs for “cabinets full of potato chips and cookies, breakfasts of Lucky Charms”--alas, her mother grows fresh vegetables and bakes dark bread. She tires of her father’s dedication, of “the language of struggle and the moral weight hanging over our lives.”

Michaels’ complaints may sound annoyingly whiny, and, in fact, “Split” often is. But it is also an engaging account on several levels. First, it offers a rare, child’s-eye view of what we now think of as “the ‘60s.” Second, it is one of the very few memoirs in which the author’s much-resented parents often appear (refreshingly, although perhaps inadvertently) more sympathetic than the author herself.

Most important, though, Michaels is a sharp observer of her own foibles. “Split” is in some ways an exercise in the very “self-criticism” that Michaels’ father inculcated in her, as well as a meditation on memory itself. “If my mother remembers only our sunlit afternoons, I have returned with a similar selectivity to the difficult times,” Michaels admits. Perhaps, she suggests, unhappy memories are akin to “setting the mind’s needle in the same groove and letting it run.” And she is aware of her manipulative investment in her pain, characterizing herself as “the lost child who stayed lost because it was her only trump.”

Ultimately, Michaels comes to a generous acceptance (well, mostly) of her parents, honoring their courage, their tenacity and their honesty. And she comes, too, to a realization that emotional inheritance is at least partly willed. Family life, she writes, is certainly “steered by . . . famine or fortune, sickness or wealth or calamity.” But there is, too, the element of choice--the ways in which we utilize our experiences, the ways in which we look at our forebears and decide “what to carry and what to toss away like useless freight.”

Michaels hasn’t exactly thrown off the freight, but she has made use of it--which may be even better--by becoming a writer of grace and perception.