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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
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Memoirs

DEAR MOM AND DAD

Patti Davis

A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew

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.

As a frequent guest columnist for the New York Times, Patti Davis has distinguished herself as one of our wisest contemporary storytellers. Far from being the enfant terrible she was once portrayed to be, Davis here turns an honest yet empathetic eye toward her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, combining bittersweet recollections - of her father, the eternal lifeguard, who saved 77 people from drowning yet failed to create a coherent AIDS policy, and of her mother, who never escaped the torture chamber of her own youth - with comedic scenes as if plucked from a sitcom, as she describes marrying her yoga instructor at the Hotel Bel-Air, hiding her marijuana stash from the FBI, and constantly evading the Secret Service. An inherently wise work about a family finally reunited through Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's diagnosis, Dear Mom and Dad will be readily appreciated by any adult grappling with the legacy of a troubled childhood. 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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Book Published 2024-02-06 by Liveright

Comments

[A] thoughtful memoir. This deeply personal account plays out over momentous twentieth-century events and offers insights into what it meant to be the child of Hollywood and Washington icons.

Patti Davis grew up in the public eye, but that doesn't mean we know what it was like for her. In this sharp, touching new book, the writer (and T&C contributor) investigates not only her own experience, but also tries to understand her famous parents and what made them into the people they were. It's a book about well known people, but it's a story that any of us can relate to - and one that all of us should read.

Marked by unwaveringly strong prose and genuine candor, this delivers.

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