Books by Patti Davis
The Long Goodbye: Memories of My Father
by Patti Davis
"Genuine and heartfelt."—San Diego Union-Tribune
Ronald Reagan’s daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimer’s disease. The simplicity with which she reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her feelings encompasses all the surprises and complexities that ambush us when death gradually, unstoppably invades life.
In this moving and illuminating portrait of a woman and her father, Patti Davis describes saying goodbye in stages, helpless against the onslaught of a disease that steals what is most precious—a person’s memory. “Alzheimer’s,” she writes, “snips away at the threads, a slow unraveling, a steady retreat; as a witness all you can do is watch, cry, and whisper a soft stream of goodbyes.” She writes of needing to be reunited at forty-two with her mother, of regaining what they had spent decades demolishing. A truce was necessary to bring together a splintered family, a few weeks before her father released his letter telling the country and the world of his illness. She delves into her memories to touch her father again, to hear his voice, to keep alive the years she had with him.
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The Long Goodbye
by Patti Davis, Raymond Chandler
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.
In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.
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The Long Goodbye
by Patti Davis, Raymond Chandler
Ronald Reagan’s daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimer’s disease. The simplicity with which she reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her feelings encompasses all the surprises and complexities that ambush us when death gradually, unstoppably invades life.
In The Long Goodbye, Patti Davis describes losing her father to Alzheimer’s disease, saying goodbye in stages, helpless against the onslaught of a disease that steals what is most precious–a person’s memory. “Alzheimer’s,” she writes, “snips away at the threads, a slow unraveling, a steady retreat; as a witness all you can do is watch, cry, and whisper a soft stream of goodbyes.”
She writes of needing to be reunited at forty-two with her mother (“she had wept as much as I over our long, embittered war”), of regaining what they had spent decades demolishing; a truce was necessary to bring together a splintered family, a few weeks before her father released his letter telling the country and the world of his illness . . .
The author delves into her memories to touch her father again, to hear his voice, to keep alive the years she had with him.
She writes as if past and present were coming together, of her memories as a child, holding her father’s hand, and as a young woman whose hand is being given away in marriage by her father . . . of her father teaching her to ride a bicycle, of the moment when he let her go and she went off on her own . . . of his teaching her the difference between a hawk and a buzzard . . . of the family summer vacations at a rented beach house–each of them tan, her father looking like the athlete he was, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and lean torso. . . . She writes of how her father never resisted solitude, in fact was born for it, of that strange reserve that made people reach for him. . . . She recalls him sitting at his desk, writing, staring out the window . . . and she writes about the toll of the disease itself, the look in her father’s eyes, and her efforts to reel him back to her.
Moving . . . honest . . . an illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease, and a woman and her father.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Floating in the Deep End: How Caregivers Can See Beyond Alzheimer's
by Patti Davis
With the heartfelt prose of a loving daughter, Patti Davis provides a life raft for the caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients.
“For the decade of my father’s illness, I felt as if I was floating in the deep end, tossed by waves, carried by currents, but not drowning,” writes Patti Davis in this searingly honest and deeply moving account of the challenges involved in taking care of someone stricken with Alzheimer’s.
When her father, the fortieth president of the United States, announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in an address to the American public in 1994, the world had not yet begun speaking about this cruel, mysterious disease. Yet overnight, Ronald Reagan and his immediate family became the face of Alzheimer’s, and Davis, once content to keep her family at arm’s length, quickly moved across the country to be present during “the journey that would take [him] into the sunset of [his] life.”
Empowered by all she learned from caring for her father―about the nature of the illness, but also about the loss of a parent―Davis founded a support group for the family members and friends of Alzheimer’s patients. Along with a medically trained cofacilitator, she met with hundreds of exhausted and devastated attendees to talk through their pain and confusion. While Davis was aware that her own circumstances were uniquely fortunate, she knew there were universal truths about dementia, and even surprising gifts to be found in a long goodbye.
With Floating in the Deep End, Davis draws on a welter of experiences to provide a singular account of battling Alzheimer’s. Eloquently woven with personal anecdotes and helpful advice tailored specifically for the overlooked caregiver, this essential guide covers every potential stage of the disease from the initial diagnosis through the ultimate passing and beyond. Including such tips as how to keep a loved one hygienic, and careful responses for when they drift to a time gone by, Davis always stresses the emotional milestones that come with slow-burning grief.
Along the way, Davis shares how her own fractured family came together. With unflinching candor, she recalls when her mother, Nancy, who for decades could not show her children compassion or vulnerability, suddenly broke down in her arms. Davis also offers tender moments in which her father, a fabled movie star whom she always longed to know better, revealed his true self―always kind, even when he couldn’t recognize his own daughter.
An inherently wise work that promises to become a classic, Floating in the Deep End ultimately provides hope to struggling families while elegantly illuminating the fragile human condition.
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$18.95
Floating in the Deep End: How Caregivers Can See Beyond Alzheimer's
by Patti Davis
With the heartfelt prose of a loving daughter, Patti Davis provides a life raft for the caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients.
“For the decade of my father’s illness, I felt as if I was floating in the deep end, tossed by waves, carried by currents, but not drowning,” writes Patti Davis in this searingly honest and deeply moving account of the challenges involved in taking care of someone stricken with Alzheimer’s.
When her father, the fortieth president of the United States, announced his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in an address to the American public in 1994, the world had not yet begun speaking about this cruel, mysterious disease. Yet overnight, Ronald Reagan and his immediate family became the face of Alzheimer’s, and Davis, once content to keep her family at arm’s length, quickly moved across the country to be present during “the journey that would take [him] into the sunset of [his] life.”
Empowered by all she learned from caring for her father―about the nature of the illness, but also about the loss of a parent―Davis founded a support group for the family members and friends of Alzheimer’s patients. Along with a medically trained cofacilitator, she met with hundreds of exhausted and devastated attendees to talk through their pain and confusion. While Davis was aware that her own circumstances were uniquely fortunate, she knew there were universal truths about dementia, and even surprising gifts to be found in a long goodbye.
With Floating in the Deep End, Davis draws on a welter of experiences to provide a singular account of battling Alzheimer’s. Eloquently woven with personal anecdotes and helpful advice tailored specifically for the overlooked caregiver, this essential guide covers every potential stage of the disease from the initial diagnosis through the ultimate passing and beyond. Including such tips as how to keep a loved one hygienic, and careful responses for when they drift to a time gone by, Davis always stresses the emotional milestones that come with slow-burning grief.
Along the way, Davis shares how her own fractured family came together. With unflinching candor, she recalls when her mother, Nancy, who for decades could not show her children compassion or vulnerability, suddenly broke down in her arms. Davis also offers tender moments in which her father, a fabled movie star whom she always longed to know better, revealed his true self―always kind, even when he couldn’t recognize his own daughter.
An inherently wise work that promises to become a classic, Floating in the Deep End ultimately provides hope to struggling families while elegantly illuminating the fragile human condition.
Copies
No copies available.
Two Cats and the Woman They Own: or Lessons I Learned from My Cats
by Patti Davis
Patti Davis didn't really adopt Aretha, her first cat. Aretha adopted Patti. When her second cat, Skeeter, moved in, Patti came to realize that shea self-avowed dog personwas now officially in thrall to two very demanding little felines. In 12 short chapters, each delightfully illustrated by Ward Schumaker, the author recounts how her life was changed for the better by living with and learning from her cat companions. In "The Mouse That Got Away" Patti learns a valuable lesson about hope, and in "The Little Scoundrel" she realizes just how wrong a first impression can be. Davis closes each charming vignette with a "Life Lesson." The lessons, like the stories they illuminate, are thoughtful and perceptive. Davis has produced a small treasure of a book; it's sometimes wry, sometimes moving, always universal, and, most importantly, wise.
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The Earth Breaks in Colors
by Patti Davis
A racially fueled incident exposes the fissures that sit beneath the surface of friendships and families, triggering significantly more damage than the earthquake that separates them. Whisper and Odelia are eleven-year-old girls who find refuge in the quiet corner of innocent friendship. Their Southern California homes each play host to an undercurrent of secrets. For Whisper that means a fractured mother returning from rehab, for Odelia a brother whose absence is laced with mystery. Race had no real place in the playful friendship of the white Whisper and the black Odelia until a terrifying encounter brings prejudice to the forefront of their lives, opening their young hearts to ill-begotten emotion. A violent earthquake further tears the world as they know it apart. Can hope and innocence be restored? An heirloom timepiece, a curious old woman and an unlikely hero join the girls as they search for their families and understanding among the rubble. A powerful story of race and redemption by novelist Patti Davis. "Like many writers, I am never sure where stories come from," says author Patti Davis. "They seem to arrive and ask to be told. That was particularly true with The Earth Breaks in Colors. I am intrigued by the innocence of children who pay little mind to skin color, so a friendship between two girls -- one white, one black -- was a world I wanted to visit. And families with secrets is a world that often visits me as a writer." "There is a whole genre of literature in which the innocence of childhood is touched by the realities of the grown-up world - Carson McCullers' the Member of the Wedding, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye come to mind. Patti Davis - in a language that falls beguilingly on the reader's ear like a perfect whisper yet does so in a writer's voice that is both robust and tender - tells us her version of this age-old story and makes it young again." - Kevin Sessums, Mississippi Sissy and I Left it On the Mountain "Rarely in recent American life have we so needed inspiring reminders of a closeness that transcends color, is tested by the cruelty of society and the complications of family - and yet miraculously provides renewal, after all. A poetic, haunting - and importantly, healing - novel. - Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us and The News Sorority "Two pre-teen girls form a fast and important inter-racial friendship, despite the growing hostility around them. A timely, tender and unforgettable look at what love does - and what hate can destroy." - Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You This is gorgeous writing, a heartbreaking, acutely observed portrait of two Los Angeles families, united by friendship and tragedy, and the delicate journeys they make to try to keep from toppling into the cracks and canyons of the constantly fracturing paradise that is Southern California." - David Rambo About Patti Davis: "The Earth Breaks in Colors" is Patti's tenth novel. She is the author of "The Long Goodbye," a memoir about losing her father Ronald Reagan to Alzheimer's, and "Till Human Voices Wake Us," a haunting story of a tender lesbian love affair sprung from a gutting loss. In 2014 she ghost wrote "The Wit and Wisdom of Gracie: An Opinionated Pug's Guide to Life" - a warm and amusing look at the life of her pug Gracie in a California beach town. She has written screenplays and has been widely published in newspapers and magazines.
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Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew
by Patti Davis
A remarkably poignant writer for our troubled times, Patti Davis writes about love, loss, and the power of redemption in this poetic letter to her long-gone parents. 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 readers 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. Just as she re-examines her own role in an increasingly dysfunctional family drama, 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, something she always dreamed of becoming. 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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$21.99