DEAR MOM AND DAD

The daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan offers an intimate glimpse into the life she shared with her two iconic parents.

In this deeply personal epistolary memoir, Davis, the author of The Long Goodbye and Angels Don’t Die, examines the “private reality” behind the couple’s public image that only she knew as their rebellious first-born daughter. The tone in which she addresses her parents is as loving as it is forgiving. Yet the author still continues her search for “truths” to help her understand the “distance and dissonance in our family.” Her earliest memories are happy ones that included “laughter and warmth,” even from the mother who made Davis the target of her “formidable” rages and kept the author’s brother, Ron, from associating with her when they grew older. The author writes warmly about the father who taught her how to ride horses and ignore bullies, but also loved America enough to make Davis feel “a bad case of sibling rivalry with this country.” Distanced from her father by his ambitions (and later, the conservatism of his beliefs) and victimized by her mother, Davis became a woman whose own anger “ruined romantic relationships, turned me down wrong paths, blinded me.” A desire to understand her parents’ secret griefs—e.g., the maternal abandonment that scarred her mother and paternal alcoholism that disrupted her father’s childhood—eventually brought Davis closer to understanding her parents. But it was her father’s Alzheimer’s disease that ultimately helped her make a separate peace with both “Mom and Dad” and own the “broken pieces” of her family. Humane, elegiac, and wise, this book moves smoothly through its portrait of a complicated family and of the daughter who learned the lessons of patient acceptance that family had to offer.

A fully candid and profoundly moving memoir.