Column: For years, the Reagans' daughter regretted some things she wrote. Now she's at peace

Being the child of our parents is, on an existential level, everyone's life's work. We are all shaped by the people who gave us life, their presence or their absence, their loving support or pathological abuse and all the myriad types of influence in between.

For Patti Davis, however, that life's work has been quite literal.

She began chronicling her singular life as the only daughter and oldest child of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in 1986 with the roman a clef "Home Front." She followed it in 1992 with the tell-all "The Way I See It: An Autobiography," a book that was, depending on the politics of the reader, both wildly praised and viciously criticized and for which she has spent the last two decades expressing regret.

Her subsequent books have been kinder: "Angels Don't Die: My Father's Gift of Faith" (1995) offer some of the life lessons the former president taught his daughter. "The Long Goodbye:and activist, which she continued in "Floating in the Deep End: How Caregivers Can See Beyond Alzheimer's" (2021). "The Lives Our Mothers Leave Us: Prominent Women Discuss the Complex, Humorous, and Ultimately Loving Relationships They Have With Their Mothers" (2009) is rooted in Davis' complicated feelings about her own mother.