The Long Goodbye, Patti Davis
The Long Goodbye, Patti Davis
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The Long Goodbye
A Memoir

Author: Patti Davis

Narrator: Patti Davis

Abridged: 2 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/16/2004


Synopsis

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.

About The Author

Patti Davis is the author of five books, including The Way I See It and Angels Don’t Die. Her articles have appeared in many magazines and newspapers, among them Time, Newsweek, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Los Angeles.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Dana on August 28, 2011

This was a book I read through tears. It had nothing to do with Ronald Reagan, the president, but everything to do with a daughter watching her father battle Alzheimers. It was amazing to hear so many of the same emotions and questions coming from Patti that I asked myself many times. I guess when i......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on March 17, 2015

I loved this book! I love her writing style. One thing that is for sure, Patti inherited her father's ability to evoke emotion. Some of her passages were so beautifully written I had to read them over and over again. I truly love President Reagan, as a child of the 80s he was the first president I r......more

Goodreads review by Lesli on March 01, 2011

The back of the book says Biography, but I'm pretty sure its a memoir. Not much straight fact, mostly feelings and emotions. That is the official classification, right?! I read this book because I thought it would be more about Alzheimer than it was. The book is about Ronald Regan's daughter coming......more

Goodreads review by Pat on June 11, 2008

This book is a good read for anyone who has a loved one that has Alzheimer's. Sometimes you cry. The author gives a personal account of her life with her father as he is living with Alzheimer's. In this book she writes "Alzheimer's snips away at the the threads, a slow unraveling, a steady retreat;......more

Goodreads review by Maria on July 10, 2008

My grandma suffered from Alzheimer's so it was very interesting to read the experiences and feelings of Ronald Reagan's daughter as she was dealing with his disease. Despite political differences, she had nothing negative to say about him which gave me a greater appreciation for him.......more


Quotes

"Patti Davis has presented the world with a very, very great gift—a lasting tribute to her father, a model of courage and acceptance, a powerful description of the slow, merciless thievery of Alzheimer's disease, and a testament to the incredible resiliency of the human spirit. The pages of The Long Goodbye are electric with love, pain, loss, forgiveness, and a strange, shining beauty.  I adored this book.  It hurt my heart.  It lifted my heart."
—Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried