Patti Davis can relate to Prince Harry writing a tell-all memoir about a prominent family, so she is offering him some advice after her own autobiography left her with regret.
The author and daughter of former President Ronald Reagan spoke on TODAY on Jan. 9 about how she navigated the aftermath of her 1992 autobiography, "The Way I See It," in which she wrote about her father being distant, former first lady Nancy Reagan allegedly being a cruel mother and other dark family issues.
"It was a lot of internal work," Davis told Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb. "It was a lot of grief, really, to accept that I had made a huge mistake and I made it publicly. It was like 40 years ago now, but it was brutal. I was, like, hated. I got death threats. It was really, really brutal."
Davis, 70, also wrote about the experience in a New York Times op-ed on Jan. 7 in which she shared some of her hard-earned wisdom with Harry ahead of the publication of his own buzzed-about memoir, "Spare," which will be released on Jan. 10.
"My suggestion in this op-ed was that silence and reflection is very valuable," Davis said. "To take a step back and try to look through a wider lens, look at the whole picture, get some insight that way because it’s a bigger picture than just your story."
She wrote in her op-ed about how she came to view her book decades later.
"I've learned something else about truth: Not every truth has to be told to the entire world," she wrote. "People are always going to be curious about famous families, and often the stories from those families can resonate with others, give them insight into their own situations, even transcend time since fame flutters at the edges of eternity.
"But not everything needs to be shared, a truth that silence can teach."
Davis, who is the oldest of Ronald Reagan's two children with Nancy, endured what she called the "huge shadow" of being part of the first family when she was in her 20s and early 30s.
"You don't feel like you exist as an individual," she said. "You don't feel that you are taking up space. You don't feel that you matter, and it's human nature to want to feel that you matter so you think, 'Well, if I just sort of open the floodgates and tell everything, then I'll take up space, then I will matter, then they'll have to listen to me.'
"The problem with that is, the only thing that's taking up space is all the things that you're saying about other people."
Harry has written and spoken in televised interviews about clashes with his brother, Prince William, as well as his father, King Charles III, and other royal family members. Davis said she watched Harry's interview on "60 Minutes" on Jan. 8 and was struck by a particular moment.
"The phrase that jumped out at me was 'my truth,'" Davis said. "As I said in this op-ed, that's a really narrow way of looking at things, and I did it, too. 'This is my truth.' But the full story is other people's truths also."
She referred to a moment cited by Harry in which King Charles III put a hand on him but never embraced him following the tragic death of Harry's mother, Princess Diana, in a 1997 car crash.
“I’d like to know what Charles’ story is with his father," Davis said. "Where’s that part of the story? He I’m sure would’ve wanted to be a more hands-on father. I’m not sure — I suspect. That’s part of the story too, do you know what I mean?"
In the years after her controversial autobiography, Davis was able to reconnect with her father after he announced in 1994 that he had Alzheimer's disease. She wrote about that time in her 2021 memoir, "Floating in the Deep End."
She was asked how Harry could maybe one day do something similar and heal the rift with the royal family.
"I think the only way you do it is to change within yourself," she said. "It requires some reflection, it requires some silence, some stepping back."
Davis admittedly never reached a point of complete reconciliation with her parents before their deaths.
"I'm not going to sugarcoat things, we never did become a close, cohesive family, but I think that's part of it," she said. "You have to accept what your family is, and accept what your parents brought to the table.
"For me it was a lot of spiritual work, and part of that was to accept that my family was what it was," she continued. "It was a fractured family. It was never going to be the Brady Bunch."