Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter about Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew

A remarkably poignant writer for our troubled times, Patti Davis writes about love, loss, and the power of redemption in this poetic letter to her long-gone parents. Written with dignity and grace in the form of a letter to her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Dear Mom and Dad is that surprisingly poignant work that succeeds not only as a memoir but as a moving account that will inspire readers to recall their own childhoods in a totally new light. Eager to retell the narrative of her own family and her coming-of-age, Patti Davis casts aside misperceptions that defined her in the past. Far from being the enfant terrible, Dear Mom and Dad reveals young Patti as a sensitive child, who was not able to be the public person her family demanded. Just as she re-examines her own role in an increasingly dysfunctional family drama, Davis casts an empathetic yet honest eye on her parents—on her father, the eternal lifeguard, who saved seventy-seven people, yet failed to create a coherent AIDS policy, and her mother, who never escaped her own tortured youth. What comes across are Davis's burnished skills as a writer, something she always dreamed of becoming. Even as she unravels her mother's highly edited persona, and her father's loving but distant personality, Davis remains steadfast in her artistic expression, as she melds irony, comedy, and tragedy with dreamlike memories of an ever-present past. Dear Mom and Dad, with its account of her father's Alzheimer's and her mother's end-of-life struggles, becomes an account of forgiveness, reaching levels of redemption rarely found in contemporary memoirs. A remarkably poignant writer for our troubled times, Patti Davis writes about love, loss, and the power of redemption in this poetic letter to her long-gone parents. As a frequent guest columnist for the New York Times, Patti Davis has distinguished herself as one of our wisest contemporary storytellers. Far from being the enfant terrible she was once portrayed to be, Davis here turns an honest yet empathetic eye toward her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, combining bittersweet recollectionsof her father, the eternal lifeguard, who saved 77 people from drowning yet failed to create a coherent AIDS policy, and of her mother, who never escaped the torture chamber of her own youthwith comedic scenes as if plucked from a sitcom, as she describes marrying her yoga instructor at the Hotel Bel-Air, hiding her marijuana stash from the FBI, and constantly evading the Secret Service. An inherently wise work about a family finally reunited through Ronald Reagans Alzheimers diagnosis, Dear Mom and Dad will be readily appreciated by any adult grappling with the legacy of a troubled childhood.