Patti Davis to Pen Book Addressed to Her Late Parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan

When her father was president, she was known as a wild child. Now, Patti Davis plans to pen book focusing on 'moments of love and bonding'

When Patti Davis was living in California’s Topanga Canyon, her mother, Nancy Reagan — famous for her “Just Say No” anti-drug advocacy — came to visit during harvest season. Her crop? Marijuana. “I had the plants hanging in my house, and I had to take them over to my neighbors and have them babysit the plants while she was there!” laughs Davis, the third child of the late former President Ronald Reagan (and his first with his second wife, Nancy).

It’s one of the more humorous moments in her forthcoming book, “Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew,” set to be published on February 6, 2024. “Some of it's dramatic, but there are some funny parts in there, too,” she adds.

“I wanted to tell the story about taking a step back and looking at your family through a wider lens,” Davis says. “ It doesn't mean that there weren't problems there. It doesn't mean that there weren't fractures there. My family was what it was. Anybody's family is. But I think with age, hopefully, you do learn to look through a wider lens to step back and say, ‘Okay, well, what were my parents' stories? And how did this all come about? And why did it come about? And where were there moments of love and bonding?’”

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For Davis, who has previously written both fiction and nonfiction, including The Long Goodbye, a chronicle of her relationship father, this new book provides the opportunity to re-examine what were sometimes difficult relationships. After all, both Nancy and Ronald Reagan were famously conservative, in contrast to their more free-spirited daughter — a source of conflict she mined in a somewhat controversial memoir, The Way I See It, published in 1992.

Still, as she points out, there was love there, even when it was obscured by political and personal disagreements. “I loved the idea of talking directly to my parents. I think it's very profound because you're talking to people who obviously are not here anymore, and you can say things that you couldn't have said when they were still alive,” Davis adds. (Ronald Reagan died in 2004 and Nancy Reagan in 2016.)

Writing a book in the form of letters to her late parents “was scary,” Davis admits, but she adds that she thinks the result will be helpful to those who read it. “I've worked really hard on processing my relationship with my parents, in part because it has been so public, and in part because I've made some of it public, which I regret. But I think since I have, that I almost feel obligated to make the other end of that process public too, that this is what I've learned, this is how I've grown. And for whatever it's worth to other people who are going through challenging relationships, if you can learn from where I've come to, then I think that's really valuable.”

RELATED: Nancy Reagan's Romance with Ronald 'Was Probably More Important Than Their Love for Their Children,' Says Friend Larry King

Although her parents were in the White House from 1981 to 1989, Davis says, politics are not the main subject of the book. She remembers when she was 11 years old and her father gave a speech in Arizona in the early 1960s, before he won the California gubernatorial election in 1966.

I was sitting there listening to him give this speech, and I remember having this feeling that... Well, I remember having a feeling that he was going to be president, actually,” Davis recalls. That feeling left her “terrified,” she says, both because of how it would change her life, and because she had a premonition that her father would be shot — as he was in 1981, early in his first term as president.

RELATED: A Legendary First Couple's Bravest Hour Is Relived in 'Killing Reagan'

“I don't get into a lot of politics, but I try to think about where he came from, and what influences he had, and what he brought to the task of the presidency,” she adds.

As for what she hopes readers will take away from the book, Davis says, “I hope it'll make people look at their own families, their own lives, their own relationships, like I said, through a wider lens with more generosity if they have issues with their parents.”

“Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew” will be published on February 6, 2024.

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