Dear Mom and Dad
A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew
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Narrated by:
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Emily Sutton-Smith
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By:
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Patti Davis
About this listen
Written with dignity and grace in the form of a letter to her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Dear Mom and Dad is that surprisingly poignant work that succeeds not only as a memoir but as a moving account that will inspire listeners to recall their own childhoods in a totally new light.
Eager to retell the narrative of her own family and her coming-of-age, Patti Davis casts aside misperceptions that defined her in the past. Far from being the enfant terrible, Dear Mom and Dad reveals young Patti as a sensitive child, who was not able to be the public person her family demanded. Davis casts an empathetic yet honest eye on her parents—on her father, the eternal lifeguard, who saved seventy-seven people, yet failed to create a coherent AIDS policy, and her mother, who never escaped her own tortured youth.
What comes across are Davis's burnished skills as a writer. Even as she unravels her mother's highly edited persona, and her father's loving but distant personality, Davis remains steadfast in her artistic expression, as she melds irony, comedy, and tragedy with dreamlike memories of an ever-present past. Dear Mom and Dad, with its account of her father's Alzheimer's and her mother's end-of-life struggles, becomes an account of forgiveness, reaching levels of redemption rarely found in contemporary memoirs.
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What listeners say about Dear Mom and Dad
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- Amy H.
- 04-14-24
Profound sadness
My heart broke at the endless dialogue of disappointment and sadness for the Reagan family. May you find hope and peace in knowing that in heaven, all hearts are healed and the void of humanness is no more. I pray you find peace on this side of heaven that your heart longs for. Best regards, and thank you for sharing your touching story.
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- do
- 11-23-24
Trash
Petty, spoiled and ungrateful. I pray for the kids and grandchildren to have her for a mother.
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- susan mulkey
- 11-21-24
whined and more whining
I did not like how she spoke about her mom, and whined about her mom.
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