Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

  • The Long Goodbye

  • A Memoir
  • By: Patti Davis
  • Narrated by: Staci Snell
  • Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)
Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
The Long Goodbye cover art

The Long Goodbye

By: Patti Davis
Narrated by: Staci Snell
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Follow Your Heart cover art
Finding Magic cover art
Chosen Forever cover art
The Scent of Water cover art
Stars at Night cover art
One Native Life cover art
The Christmas Star cover art
My Name Is Memory cover art
A Doula's Journey cover art
A Crazy, Holy Grace cover art
Your Life Isn't for You cover art
Marrow cover art
Unspeakable cover art
The God I Love cover art
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice cover art
Abandon Me cover art

Summary

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 42 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. 

©2004 Patti Davis (P)2004 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

"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)

What listeners say about The Long Goodbye

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.