The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 12 October 2015
by Anastasia Galadriel Machacek
It has almost become a common trope, now, that the children of hippies grew up with too much freedom, not enough structure, and ended up yearning for a more "normal" life. We forget that there was something that might have been good and lasting about the hippie generation. It wasn't all sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. It wasn't all a fashion statement. But the alternative lifestyle could be taxing, and was more so for the kids who tailed along behind parents who went on a journey of self-discovery, too often forgetting to discover their responsibilities for the health and well-being of the small people they'd brought into the world. Absolute freedom, it turned out, wasn't that good for everyone.
In the past few decades, as they've come of age, children of the hippie generation have come out with some of their own stories. Many of these are engrossing journeys into the searching personalities of their parents, and the conflict of that search with so-called "mainstream" society. Other books read like a litany of potential disaster, or "would you believe this" adventure. This one falls more into that category. Anastasia Galadriel Machacek was the only daughter, born in 1968, of a woman searching for her own path through an alternative career in life. What this meant was that she was just two and a half years old when she took her first (accidental) LSD trip, that she hitchiked with her mother on Christmas Eve, lived in cars or in beach caves, and lurched around the west and Hawaii, from commune to commune. It sounds disturbing enough, but Machacek takes it all in stride. After all, once one is immersed in an itinerant hippie subculture, how is a small child to know her life is more challenging, more deprived (maybe) than that of other kids? The author presents all of this, and more, in a matter-of-fact manner. It is sort of a Whole Earth Catalog of stops on the road of the hippie movement from the end of the 60s, through the mid 1980s.
This book has all the appearance of a self-published memoir, and thus suffers from some of the drawbacks of that form. It isn't great literature. It reads almost as if it is a story written to children, perhaps Machacek's own children, explaining what it was like to grow up a hippie child. It has the tone that it may be targeted to children or young adults. Much is explained that is so much a part of our cultural history, that it didn't really need explaining in the first place. It is slightly pedantic and reads like a list of what some readers might find as a horror story. We are left wanting to know more about her mother's background, and why she took the path she did, taking her young daughter along for the ride. And yet, Machacek is very forgiving of her mother. She has some moments of critique of the lifestyle, but seems generally positive on the memories. And, though it is a simple tale, and a quick read, she does manage to touch upon some of the elements that made a hippie childhood occasionally magical, elements rarely investigated elsewhere. Finally, as it is self-published, the book may be a small challenge to find. It has its rewards for the effort, though.
See also:
[The Hypocrisy of Disco by Clane Hayward]
[Wild Child edited by Chelsea Cain]
[Split Lisa Michaels]
[Pagan Time by Micah Perks]