‘We’ve all been wounded’ Patti Davis on secrets, abuse and life as Ronald Reagan’s daughter
almost 2 years in The guardian
To the outside world, she was wrapped up in the love of the perfect family. In reality, she was struggling with her father’s remoteness, her mother Nancy’s rages – and worse. The actor and author looks back on years of unhappinessWhen I ask Patti Davis what she’d like people to take from the new memoir she has written about her long and often mind-boggling family history, she has no trouble finding an answer. “You have a choice,” she says. “You can live as the person who you were … I did that for a long time – like, ‘Let me tell you what a victim I was, let me tell you how I was wounded.’ But we’ve all been wounded in some ways. And it’s not about going into denial about that – it’s about looking at it from a different perspective.”From someone else, those words might sound like psychobabble. But in Davis’s case, they highlight what has arguably defined her life – trying to make sense of being the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan – and a story that mixes politics and power with the more human themes of anger, emotional estrangement, damage and broken relationships. Continue reading...