Dear Mom and Dad

January 15, 2024
Davis (The Long Goodbye) reflects on her troubled relationships with her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, in this slim yet sturdy memoir. Written entirely in the second person, the loose chronology traces Davis’s regret-filled recognition that “the circle” of her parents’ “own private world” left no room for her. Before he was governor of California and president of the United States, Ronald Reagan was the affable host of TV’s General Electric Theater. Davis’s early memories, though happy, usher in the lifelong specter of his celebrity: “Whether or not a family is famous, there exists a public perception and a private reality.... In our case, the whole world was looking in.” Later, Davis’s politics diverged from her parents’ and the family grew estranged. “In his play Angels in America, Tony Kushner writes, ‘The Reagans only speak to each other through their agents.’ Not completely true, but close enough,” Davis acknowledges. Attempts to rehabilitate her father’s political legacy by contrasting his personal beliefs with the policies of the contemporary Republican Party, as when she invokes John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Reagan to wonder what her father “would think of the AR-15s, now brazenly legal, that are being used to slaughter innocent people,” can feel like overreach, but Davis excels when focusing more tightly on the peculiarities of being the adult daughter of American royalty. Marked by unwaveringly strong prose and genuine candor, this delivers.

September 13, 2024

In this epistolary memoir, Davis (The Long Goodbye), the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, holds nothing back as she ponders the life she shared with her parents. Adeptly narrated by Emily Sutton-Smith, this candid memoir is filled with an insider's insights into what made the Reagans tick as individuals and a couple. Davis describes her father's deeply ingrained patriotism as well as the disappointment she felt when politics took him away from home. Her warm memories of growing up in "the GE House" (Ronald Reagan hosted the 1950s television program General Electric Theater), the shock of meeting her half-siblings, and the anger at her loss of privacy as the First Daughter are palpable. Sutton-Smith infuses Davis's recollections of the assassination attempt with a range of emotions--shock and fear, then surprise at how close she and Nancy became at that time. Davis's passion as an antinuclear activist and the pride she felt as her father negotiated the 1987 INF Treaty are matched by her disappointment that he did nothing to research a cure for HIV/AIDS. VERDICT A thoughtful and balanced memoir, tracing a daughter's complicated relationship with parents who lived much of their lives in the public eye.--Stephanie Bange

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