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?’”
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.”
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.
“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.
Kara Fox
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.
source: people.com
