A Child's Eye View of the Counterculture
Lisa Michaels (lisam@nwlink.com)
Tue, 30 Mar 1999 16:11:55 -0700
I stumbled across your site while browsing the web and was delighted to
read some of the ongoing discussion about the sixties. I wrote a memoir
called SPLIT: A COUNTERCULTURE CHILDHOOD (out in paperback from Houghton
Mifflin in April 1999). My father was a Weatherman; my mother and
stepfather and I spent a year traveling across the country in a converted
mail van. In some ways my parents went on to embody the two poles of the
counterculture: my father became a Marxist labor organizer, my mother moved
to a rural Northern California town to grow veggies and teach public
school. I have enormous respect for the work my parents did (The New Yorker
called SPLIT "the best argument for the left since Marx," which is clearly
hyperbole, but it gets at a central fact: this is a story of loving family
making their way through a tumultuous time, not a ratification of the old
cliches about flakey hippie parents). I thought the visitors to this site
might find it an interesting read. -Lisa Michaels