Description: As a young child, Michaels visited her father in prison, where he was serving a sentence for his part in an antiwar protest. Later she toured the country with her mother and stepfather in a customized mail truck, complete with Oriental rugs and a wood stove, before they settled in a small California town to grow vegetables. At eight a veteran of political leaflet-folding sessions, she consecrated her father's second marriage in a Berkeley park by reading from Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Not surprisingly, Michaels grew up craving conformity, 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 in the Reagan years, she went through a hippie revival phase, and against the conservative backdrop of that time, her family history began to take on new meaning. In the end, Michaels goes on a journey very much in the spirit of her upbringing and comes to an unforeseen reckoning.

In Split, Lisa Michaels offers a strikingly textured portrait of her youthful days of communes, road trips, and political rallies, and of what came after -- for her parents and herself -- as the 1960s and 1970s gave way.

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