Column: For years, the Reagans’ daughter regretted some things she wrote. Now she’s at peace

On the Shelf Dear Mom and Dad By Patti Davis Liveright: 192 pages, $22 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores Being the child of our parents is, on an existential level, everyone’s life‘s work. It’s not just your story, it’s their story too.” 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 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. If you want to understand my father, you have to understand that pretty much everything goes back to being a child of an alcoholic.” Many would disagree with such a sympathetic take on what is now widely understood as a profound failure of leadership, just as many people, including my own father, believed that the policies enacted during Reagan’s presidency made it impossible to consider him a “nice” man. 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, she said, that “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. If you have a parent who is intimidating to you, it never goes away.” When she wrote “As I See It,” a book that Davis, during this interview, literally will not name, she was at the beginning of a long journey toward reconciliation that began, she says now, with “‘Let me tell you everything I’m forgiving them for, in detail.’ That’s the point I was making in the Prince Harry piece — that you don’t have to tell everything, you don’t have to open the floodgates.