The Metamorphosis of Mermie : FIRST FATHER, FIRST DAUGHTER A Memoir <i> by Maureen Reagan (Little, Brown: $19.95; 415 pp.) </i>

Maureen Reagan has very large hips, an anatomical feature that leads to mean jokes behind her back when she speaks at political gatherings. (“Oh look, who’s that in the hooped skirt?” said one cruel commentator last year at the Republican Convention.)

Maureen also loves to hog the spotlight, and sometimes she talks without thinking. When her father was in the White House, she drew ridicule by implying that she was one of his top advisers and by referring to herself as a “roving ambassador” after taking foreign trips that were encouraged by her father’s aides to get her out of their hair.

All of this makes it easy for book critics and politicos alike to trash “First Father, First Daughter,” Maureen’s chronicle of her life as Ronald Reagan’s first-born.

But I had another reaction to this book. I came away with new respect for Maureen Reagan and what she has been through in her 48 years, much of which I have confirmed independently.

She remembers Ronald Reagan as a wonderful father when she was very young. They would have long talks as they rode around Los Angeles in his car, and he sometimes entertained her by pretending to eavesdrop on the conversations carried by telephone wires overhead.

But Maureen’s world was shattered at age 7 when her mother, actress Jane Wyman, filed for divorce. Three years later Ronald Reagan met the love of his life, Nancy Davis, and after that he was an increasingly remote figure for Maureen.

Ronnie and Nancy eventually had two children of their own, and imagine the blow to Maureen when she learned, years later, that her half-sister, Patti, was 8 years old before her parents revealed that Maureen was related to her.

For much of her life, it seems, everyone from her parents to her father’s advisers has been trying to figure out what to do with Maureen.

At one point she was so estranged from her father that she didn’t seek his protection, or even his advice, when her first husband abused her. This revelation in the book stunned longtime friends who knew nothing of the beatings, which took place in the early 1960s when Maureen was briefly married to a policeman and living in Washington.

The chapter about the abuse has gotten Maureen’s book a lot of attention, but I found it the least interesting part because her husband--whom she does not name--never seems real. She just mentions the horror of that marriage and then drops it to return to the main theme, which is her rocky relationship with her father.

During Reagan’s first campaign for California governor in 1966, his political advisers did their best to hide Maureen because her presence would remind voters of Reagan’s divorce.

She says that when she complained to her father about this, he shrugged and said: “If you pay someone to manage a campaign, then you’ve got to give them the authority to do as they see fit.”

It was like that for years, through both terms of Reagan’s governorship, through his runs for the presidency and on into his early years in the White House. It became a test of wills as Reagan’s advisers tried to shut Maureen out and Maureen tried desperately to get her father’s attention.

Often she was her own worst enemy. Her craving to be the center of attention sometimes led even her friends to cringe, and the book reveals that she still has not come to grips with her clumsy attempts over the years to capitalize on her father’s celebrity and power.

But if personal growth is one of our fairest measures of people, this book convinced me that Maureen Reagan deserves more credit than she often gets. She learned to balance her camera-hogging with thoughtful comments; she developed an appreciation for the history of the country and the specialness of the White House, and she served with distinction as the U.S. representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

And long before others figured it out, Maureen knew that Michael Deaver and Donald Regan were not always doing things in her father’s best interests.

After years of being an outsider in her father’s world, Maureen finally got a break late in his first term as President.

It came when he asked her why polls were showing him to be increasingly unpopular with women. She took the opening and told him that he had to be more demonstrative toward women in a political sense.

She never persuaded him to support the equal rights amendment, but she did get him to do other things, including attending a birthday celebration for suffragette Susan B. Anthony in 1984. His appearance--which his top advisers opposed--got him some good press and it must have worked: In the election that year, Reagan got more votes from women than Walter F. Mondale, according to exit polls.

After that, the President began to listen more often to “Mermie,” as he has called Maureen since she was a baby, and they became closer. She began staying in the White House and often took meals with the President.

Maureen and Nancy Reagan also became much closer after former Chief of Staff Regan treated both of them shabbily early in the President’s second term. And when the Iran-Contra scandal broke in late 1986, Maureen and Nancy formed a pact to restore and protect Ronald Reagan’s image, a pact that exists to this day.

Political hardballers will ridicule this book for the way Maureen gushes throughout--”I still get a thrill just driving through the White House gates”--but I think she knows her readers. They are the loyal viewers of Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue, the people who are not too jaded to enjoy a tour of the White House and who can fantasize about filling a vase from the Rose Garden.

They are also the people who will appreciate a tale of perseverance, for this is the story of an admittedly flawed person who refuses to let her famous father write her out of his life and winds up sleeping in Lincoln’s bed and offering advice--and in a dark hour, moral support--to one of the most popular Presidents of this century.