Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew
Feb 2024 · Liveright Publishing
3.5star
2 reviewsreport
Ebook
192
Pages
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About this ebook
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.
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.
Ratings and reviews
3.5
2 reviews
Susie Cox
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June 23, 2024
This is the latest offering about the Reagans by Patti Davis. This book should have been titled "Reagan Family Secrets". She reveals a great deal of personal information about the family that should have remained private. Davis, for all of her posturing about how she's "resolved" her anger for her mother Nancy, don't you believe it! Even after the two have been gone these many years, Davis STILL harbors anger and bitterness towards them, which she will probably take to her grave. Although I found the book interesting, (because I love Ronnie & Nancy), I found that Davis displayed a lot of resentment. In my opinion, she should seek psychological counselling! Despite her writing, I STILL LOVE & RESPECT RONNIE & NANCY!
About the author
Patti Davis is the daughter of Nancy and Ronald Reagan and the author of many books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Floating in the Deep End and The Long Goodbye. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times.
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