[imagesource: The U.S. National Archives]

Patti Davis once wrote a scathing tell-all book about her former-president father, Ronald Reagan, and their dysfunctional family in the 1980s and 1990s.

They’re sitting together at an event up top, before the shit hit the fan, presumedly.

She regrets her autobiography now and she reckons Prince Harry, having written his memoir for the world to read about his own family feuds, will come to regret his choices one day, too.

She wishes Harry could have learned from her mistakes and shut it up for later, per the Los Angeles Times.

The author revealed in an essay for the New York Times that she actually ended up apologising to her father for writing her vengeful 1992 autobiography The Way I See It.

In her first nonfiction book, she basically “flung open the gates of our troubled family life”:

[She] revealed that Reagan was excessively detached as both a father and a leader and that her mother, the late Nancy Reagan, was abusive and had a prescription drug addiction while she touted the administration’s “Just Say No” to drugs campaign.

At 70, Davis can see how those revelations and ‘truths’ wreaked havoc for her family and herself and is sure Harry will be going down the same unfortunate path with his bombshell memoir, Spare.

Based on some leaked details about the book, Harry unleashed all his pent-up feelings about his father and brother and how the British Royals affected his mental and emotional well-being, along with his wife Meghan Markle’s.

Davis draws on the parallels:

“My justification in writing a book I now wish I hadn’t written (and please, don’t go buy it; I’ve written many other books since) was very similar to what I understand to be Harry’s reasoning,” Davis said.

“I wanted to tell the truth, I wanted to set the record straight. Naïvely, I thought if I put my own feelings and my own truth out there for the world to read, my family might also come to understand me better.

She goes on to say that this is not always the best way to handle things:

“Of course, people generally don’t respond well to being embarrassed and exposed in public. And in the ensuing years, I’ve learned something about truth: It’s way more complicated than it seems when we’re young. There isn’t just one truth, our truth — the other people who inhabit our story have their truths as well.”

She reflected on what she would tell her younger self at the time, writing that “I’d have said, “Be quiet.”’ Not forever. But until I could stand back and look at things through a wider lens. Until I understood that words have consequences, and they last a really long time”.

In referencing the tidbit Harry told about him being hit by his brother Prince William, Davis says that Harry has “indeed hit back by writing Spare” and laments how if he’d “taken time to be quiet, to reflect on the enduring power of his words” he might have “chosen differently”.

A little too late, though, as Spare has already hit the shelves and is being devoured by anyone who cares.

[source:latimes]