The Jerusalem Post - The Jerusalem Post Magazine
Making posthumous peace with parents
For years, the Reagans’ daughter regretted some of the things she wrote
While Nancy and Ronald Reagan’s oldest child and only daughter, Patti Davis, 71, recently wrote an essay on [actor] Matthew Perry’s death for The New York Times that was poignant and insightful, she, like many other authors, tends to mine her own experience in her work. Her latest book, and the seventh involving her parents, Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew, appears to provide an endnote to a lifelong exploration of her often distant, chilly, and turbulent relationship with them.
Although she remains baffled and hurt by many of their choices – be it the former president’s refusal to address the AIDS crisis for so long, or her mother’s pattern of coldness toward her children – the book provides precisely what the title promises, a later-life consideration, and re-consideration, of her parents’ lives as people who were shaped by their own early lives, and a re-contextualizing of her own memories, including a childhood that was not without joy.
Earlier this year, she even suggested that the United Kingdom’s Prince Harry might come to regret some of the revelations of his memoir, Spare, published last year.
“Taking your own experience out of it and looking at who our parents are, the same way you step back from a painting to see the whole picture,” she said, “you step back from your family to get out of your own way. It’s not just your story, it’s their story, too.”
Picturing Nancy Reagan, for instance, as a three-year-old “dumped at relatives” or Ronald Reagan as a child having to help his own drunken father off the lawn and into the house allowed her to see her parents more clearly and provided a larger context for their actions as parents.
And, in a few cases, as president and first lady.
“I didn’t want to get into politics, but I did want to get into the AIDS thing,” she said, “which the [Reagan] library doesn’t even want to deal with. I had to be honest in this book, and a lot went wrong. As I say there, for someone with really good timing, his timing was so off every step of the way.” However, she insists that her father was not homophobic. “He had people in his administration who were homophobic, who believed AIDS was God’s punishment. He wasn’t one of them, but one of his character flaws was that he delegated things and believed something was being done, and he didn’t really follow up and ask.
“And most of that is [from being] the child of an alcoholic. If you want to understand my father, you have to understand that pretty much everything goes back to being a child of an alcoholic.”
Dear Mom and Dad is not an analysis of the Reagan era or even of Ronald’s impact on the political landscape, although
Davis makes it clear that he would have deplored Donald Trump’s incitement of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and, as the victim of a shooting, this nation’s inability to pass meaningful gun legislation.
It is, instead, a daughter’s attempt to reconcile her own conflicting emotions about the people who were her parents, to be at peace with her own past.
Predictably, early coverage of Dear Mom and Dad focused almost exclusively on the “revelation” that the Reagans’ marriage had been prompted by Nancy’s discovery that she was pregnant with Davis, an “unplanned” event Davis finds difficult to reconcile with her mother’s level of self-control and attention to detail.
HOWEVER, THE epistolary style of the book is used not to dish dirt or list grievances. It’s to acknowledge that Davis’s personal pain and joy were part of a larger narrative that includes many things she can never truly know. And in that, Dear Mom and Dad offers the universal experience that many aspects of our parents remain unknowable.
“Obviously, my mother has been the most challenging relationship in my life,” she said, “and I feel like I have come to a place of more insight into her, more forgiveness, and more acceptance that it was always going to be a difficult relationship. I think you have to accept the fact that there are things you will never have an answer for.”
She and her mother went through so many phases of not speaking to each other that, she said, “you’d have to keep a diary of the reasons why.” In Dear Mom and Dad, she remembers the fractures, as well as the rapprochements, including the years when her father was ailing.
Davis describes moments of bonding between herself and her mother but says, “It was not always smooth sailing; it wasn’t always dependable that she would be open to me coming there. I wasn’t always sure who she would be when I visited. If you have a parent who is intimidating to you, it never goes away.
“I’ve spent years regretting many of the things I have written, particularly my autobiography, but as I was writing
[Dear Mom and Dad], I thought, ‘It’s probably good that all of that messiness was put out there because people can see the journey.’”
That journey, she says, is why she wrote this book.
“I really wrote this for other people who are going through whatever they are going through with their families. Because I have worked hard on this stuff. And if you’ve worked hard on things that others are going through too, you almost have an obligation to say, ‘Hey, this is what I’ve learned. And it was hard, and I stumbled, but here’s what I’ve learned.’”
Davis began chronicling her singular life in 1986 with Home Front, a roman a clef. She followed it in 1992 with the tell-all
The Way I See It: An Autobiography, a book which she came to sincerely regret and was, depending on the politics of the reader, both wildly praised and viciously criticized.
Her subsequent books were kinder: Angels Don’t Die: My Father’s Gift of Faith (1995) offers some of the life lessons the former president taught his daughter. The Lives Our Mothers Leave Us: Prominent Women Discuss the Complex, Humorous, and Ultimately Loving Relationships They Have with Their Mothers (2009) is rooted in Davis’s complicated feelings about her own mother.
The Long Goodbye: Memories of My Father (2005) deals with the former president’s long battle with Alzheimer’s. It also began Davis’s work as an Alzheimer’s educator and activist, which she continued in Floating in the Deep End: How Caregivers Can See Beyond Alzheimer’s (2021).
Many would disagree with Dear Mom and Dad’s sympathetic take on what is now widely understood as a profound failure of leadership, just as many people believed that the policies enacted during Reagan’s presidency made it impossible to consider him a “nice” man.