Patti Davis talks about her new book, 'Dear Mom and Dad'

Being the child of our parents is, on an existential level, everyone’s life’s work. We are all shaped by the people who gave us life, their presence or their absence, their loving support or lack thereof.

For Patti Davis, however, that life’s work has been quite literal.

She began chronicling her life as the only daughter and oldest child of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in 1986 with the roman á clef “Home Front.” She followed it in 1992 with the tell-all “The Way I See It: An Autobiography,” a book that was, depending on the politics of the reader, both wildly praised and viciously criticized and for which she has spent the last two decades expressing regret.

Her subsequent books have been 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 Long Goodbye: Memories of My Father” (2005) deals with his Alzheimer’s disease. It also began Davis’ 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). “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’ complicated feelings about her own mother.

Along the way, she has condemned contemporary Republicans’ persistent use of Reagan as a touchstone of the party Davis believes he would not recognize.

RON AND NANCY RECONSIDERED

Davis’ new book, “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 her parents. 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.

“I’ve been trying for years, starting when my mother was still alive,” she said in a recent interview, “to do this documentary film called ‘The Reagans Before the World Moved In,’ based on my home movies and sort of the same themes as this book: Looking at your family through different eyes, through a wider lens. Looking at childhood stuff, where it was loving and tender.”

DOCUMENTARY THAT WASN’T

But, she says, every time she met with producers who assured her that she would be in control of the project, “a mile down the road they would be taking it away from me and doing their version. . . . And I had given up.”

So when her editor suggested she address her parents directly, Davis decided she could tell the same story in book form.

Occasionally interrupted by the very affectionate Lily, a 2-year-old pug Davis adopted in August, and Minnie, her 7-year-old calico cat, Davis sat for an hour in the shade of her backyard and described a writing process that she calls very “organic.”

Picturing her mother, for instance, as a 3-year-old “dumped at relatives,” or her father 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 own 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.”

Her father, she insists, 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 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.”

LETTERS OF RECONCILIATION

But “Dear Mom and Dad” is not an analysis of the Reagan era or even his impact on the political landscape, although Davis makes it clear that he would have deplored then-President Donald Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. 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.

“I really wrote this for other people who are going through whatever they are going through with their families,” said Davis, 71. “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.’ ”