When Ronald and Nancy Reagan were the U.S. president and first lady, their clashes with their politically liberal daughter made headlines. Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew is Patti Davis's guileless and frequently stirring effort to understand the famous couple who raised her but remained elusive in their lifetimes.
Davis largely considers her parents individually: "Politics was a tangible presence, as if it had a seat at our table and competed with me for your attention, Dad"; "It's so much harder to write to you, Mom--I still fight through traces of bitterness and wrestle with the complexity of our relationship." Davis and her father had some common ground--a religious faith and a loyalty to the United States, which she feels is now so broken that, were her father "looking in" today, he'd wonder, "What has happened to the America I loved?"
Davis told her parents she regretted her notorious 1992 autobiography, "the title of which I refuse to even mention," and readers of Dear Mom and Dad shouldn't expect score settling this time around. Instead, Davis has written a kind of love letter, and her triumph is that, for all the Reagans' celebrity, she portrays her family as not so different from any other. Her goal during this "last third of my life" could be anyone's: "Our parents are part of us--the sweet moments, the difficult memories.... We find ourselves when we accept that." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer