Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew

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.