On this sunny morning, Jenna, 26, is sitting with her best friend, photographer Mia Baxter, 25, discussing their about-to-be-published book, a work of young-adult nonfiction called Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope, for which Jenna wrote the text and Mia took the photos. As the two chat—often finishing each other's sentences—the depth of their 10-year friendship becomes obvious, as does a Jenna the public rarely sees.
Despite her exaggerated party-girl image (remember the endless TV jokes when, at age 19, she was busted for trying to buy alcohol with a false ID?), the truth is Jenna has always had a serious side. For 18 months she taught elementary school in Washington, D.C. But she found her true calling last year, when she and Mia were working with UNICEF and stumbled, awed, on the real-life heroine who became the subject of their book.
Ana's Story is the eloquent, moving and true tale of a young HIV positive woman's fight for a decent life for herself and her child. But there's another story that isn't in the book. It's about how two friends found a project they could be passionate about and then nurtured one another into making it happen. It's also about how the First Daughter the late-night comics thought they knew might turn into someone very different: a bookworm, an idealist and, now, a writer.
MIA: Jenna and I met in Madrid when we were 16, during a summer-abroad program. We were both going into our junior year in high school—me in San Antonio, Jenna in Austin, Texas. Her dad was governor then, so she didn't have any Secret Service detail, and, honestly, who her father was didn't enter into our friendship. When you're in a different country as a teenager, the experience intensifies. Within the first two days, we became close friends…
JENNA: …right away! We loved music—Mia was obsessed with the Grateful Dead; I loved Van Morrison. And we loved to read.
MIA: I gave Jenna The Thorn Birds…
JENNA: …and I gave Mia Tuesdays With Morrie, which my then boyfriend—my first boyfriend—had given to me. Mia and I are so different temperamentally, so we were good complements.
MIA: When Jenna and I met, I was just falling in love with photography; I took my first serious pictures during our time in Spain. We started visiting each other when we got back to Texas. I had an exhibit of my pictures at a cafe in San Antonio. I talked to Jenna about how my older brother, Fielding, who is an artist, was motivating me to look for candor and emotion in humanity, and to photograph it.
JENNA: I had always loved to write and my mom was my editor for my school papers. "Jenna, please use the active, not the passive voice," she'd write in the margins. I was sports editor for my high school newspaper, but I think I shied away from journalism.
After high school graduation, Jenna and Mia both enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. A few months later, George W. Bush was elected President.JENNA: I was drawn to UT by the great Texas writers—like Don Graham, Larry McMurtry and Laura Furman. Freshman year Mia and I lived in the same dorm, Hardin House, but not as roommates.
MIA: Being the President's daughter was new for her. She wanted to just be Jenna and now the spotlight was on her. For example, she'd be walking 20 blocks across our huge campus with the security guys behind her. The Secret Service are wonderful people, but at the beginning it was an adjustment for her. Fortunately, they do their job so well you don't know they're there; if Jenna's visiting me in my apartment, they don't come inside and sit with us. Maybe one of the reasons it doesn't feel unusual to be the close friend of the President's daughter is that her other friends and I were intent on keeping life as normal as possible for her.
LAURA FURMAN, the award-winning memoirist and fiction writer who teaches at UT Austin: Jenna was in my personal essay class, and she was struggling to find a writing voice. She's very straightforward—and she is in her writing, too. She was really persistent in finding her voice, and the great thing was, she was so open to feedback and criticism.
MIA: Jenna and I pushed each other: Keep writing! Keep taking pictures! At that age it's really important to have people who are not your parents saying, "You are so talented." Jenna showed me a beautiful story she wrote for Laura Furman's class about her sister. I remember her songlike words, her attention to detail and how the closeness with her sister shined through.
BARBARA BUSH, Jenna's twin: The story was very personal, and it had to do with our support for each other when a friend died when we were in high school. I had no idea Jenna was going to write that, and I thought it was so sweet. I was proud of her.
JENNA: Are Barbara and I close? [Laughs.] I told our mom: "When Barbara and I get married…our poor husbands!" We even told our boyfriends, "You better be prepared. When Barbara and I are 50, we're still going to sleep in the same bed. I hope that's OK with you guys." [Jenna's "boyfriend," now fiance, is Henry Hager, 29, an MBA student and the son of Virginia's former lieutenant governor.]
But Barbara and I have always had separate best friends. In a sense, our parents raised us to be able to be good friends to others. We were encouraged to pursue our passions—I was the athlete; she was the dancer. I liked writing; she liked art. But we weren't compared.
MIA: Jenna and I always counseled and were honest with each other. If I didn't like something a boy she was dating was doing, I'd tell her. Jenna's boyfriend today is the greatest guy. He's perfect for her—so smart, and he shares her energy and spunk. Now she gives advice to me.
JENNA: By junior year in college, our conversations started changing. We went from talking about boys and relationships to much broader subjects. We wanted to make a difference in the world; we'd get obsessed.
MIA: Our becoming more mature and reading—that was probably driving our new passion. Plus, the adrenaline: Many of our talks took place while we were running.
By now I was getting used to Jenna's security detail coming along on our runs. Other than being embarrassed that an extra set of eyes would see me trip, I barely noticed them. We were training for a marathon, and on these really long runs we'd talk about someday putting my photography and her writing together.
JENNA: Between freshman and sophomore year, we went to Los Angeles and worked for an entertainment manager, Marc Gurvitz, at the Brillstein-Grey agency.
MARC GURVITZ: When a friend called the office and asked, "Do you have any intern spots for the President's daughter and her friend?" I was expecting it to be a disaster. But these two girls worked hard. There was not one thing they didn't do, from Xeroxing to picking up other people's lunches. Most interns are tentative, but Jenna and Mia would talk to anybody—they weren't shy. One time Jenna was answering phones at my desk and I heard her say, "You're only giving him three days' notice? Well, that's kind of rude!" I'm thinking, Whoa, who is she talking to? It was a social secretary at the White House, inviting our client Greg Kinnear to a screening.
Jenna was a good sport. The night she had to go to a taping of Bill Maher's show, I said, "I hope you have tough skin; there'll be jokes about your dad." She rolled with it.
But it wasn't all punishment: One day she and Mia heard, "Hi, girls, what's goin' on?" and when they turned around…it was Brad Pitt. They looked like they'd died and gone to heaven.
JENNA: The next summer Mia and I traveled around Eastern Europe. In Prague we took poetry classes at Charles University with [acclaimed poet/playwright/screenwriter] James Ragan, who was head of the graduate professional writing department at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
MIA: Dr. Ragan got us to open up. Writing poetry, which I'd never done before, makes you feel vulnerable, in terms of delving into your feelings and then reading them aloud and having them criticized.
JENNA: We just grew! We sat with Dr. Ragan in Czech president Vaclav Havel's apartment, and he told us stories of [Havel's] fight for freedom and it was just so inspirational. To be in a country that had come out of communism and where the music was so amazing, the jazz was wonderful!
JAMES RAGAN: Jenna began to really think of herself as a writer that summer. I told her, "You can't write in clichés!" and she understood. I urged her to write about the part of her family that was least known—to go back to that reservoir of experience that had shaped her. She wrote about her mother's father, a man who was a builder of houses, and she came up with one magical image about the Texas dust and the wind that "weaves the gray air." She produced an excellent poem.
I loved Jenna's combination of propriety and spunk. She and Mia were very sensitive; they cared about people. At the end of the summer, I left them with this message: "Live poetry—don't just write it. Go into the world. Go beyond what you know. Become engaged with the lives of the impoverished and find poetry there."
Although Jenna was a dedicated student, the public had a different impression of her. For years, she and Barbara were the butt of late-night TV jokes and media digs that painted them as hard-partying twins. (Said David Letterman: "President Bush spent the weekend with his daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Or, as they're better known, J&B.") It didn't help that in May 2001, they were caught violating Texas' underage drinking laws, just two weeks after Jenna had entered a no-contest plea for a similar offense.
JAMES RAGAN: I think the insults wounded Jenna. I'm sure that she shed a few tears over them.
JENNA: I don't think I'm portrayed in the media the way I really am—but then who is? People grow and change. I think the people who are open-minded realize I'm human and that people make mistakes, and, if they think of [the underage drinking incident] at all, they think, She was in college—that was seven years ago. If people want to hold on to old images, I can't let it bother me, but my friends get annoyed.
MIA: But so many of the jokes and stories about Jenna are wrong. That makes me so mad. I've written to some of the editors who print it in their pages; those people don't know what they're talking about! But Jenna doesn't let those things get to her. She is bold and outspoken and she has such passion. If my creative identity rubbed off on Jenna, her strength gives me courage. I'm stronger because of her.
TERESA BUSILLO, vice president of New York City public relations company Harrison & Shriftman, who hired Jenna for a summer internship in 2003: Jenna was so down-to-earth that I'd be shocked whenever it dawned on me that this was the President's daughter—especially the day we were traipsing around on the subway without a Secret Service agent in sight. And she was so diligent. Halfway through the summer I thought, Can I hire her permanently? But I could tell from talking to her that she was going to go into public service.
JENNA: After graduation, I got a job teaching third- and fifth-grade students at the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. I loved it. A lot of my students had emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico and El Salvador. I hope to God they didn't look at me differently because of who my father is. The wonderful thing about children is they don't care about those things.
I really began at that time to think of myself as an educator. I also noticed that it's sometimes hard to get kids interested in nonfiction, because they want something that's fun to read, that has the drama of a novel. There is some great nonfiction for children that age—Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, and of course, The Diary of Anne Frank—but somehow fiction seems more enticing to kids.
MIA: I moved to New York and became an assistant to Glamour's photo editor Suzanne Donaldson. Work at Glamour was fast-paced, and it was invaluable, for a fledgling photographer, to see first-hand the process by which editors choose the imagery. When Glamour started sending me on photo assignments, I was ecstatic. I photographed relatives of 9/11 victims and saw the variety of responses to the tragedy five years later. Some people were quiet, some were weeping; two sisters holding their brother's photo said, "He'd make so much fun of us if he could see us doing this!"
Although we were in different cities, Jenna and I kept up the book-trading we'd started when we were 16. But our tastes had matured. Jenna gave me Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and I gave her Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.
JENNA: I loved Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty. If I could meet just two writers, I'd want to meet Patchett and Hosseini.
In September 2006, heeding James Ragan's exhortation to "go into the world," Mia and Jenna moved to Panama to work as interns for UNICEF's Latin America and Caribbean office.
JENNA: My parents were very supportive of my going.
MIA: Jenna's boyfriend was amazing. She said, "Hey, I'm going to Latin America for nine months," and he was OK with it! She told me, "The way to make a relationship work is having a mate who's supportive of your passions."
JENNA: Our UNICEF bosses said, "Mia, you're a photographer; Jenna, you write. So why don't you both travel around, take pictures and write about the children we serve. To raise awareness, we really need personal stories. We need to put a face on this child who is living on the street or not going to school." We were sent to Paraguay, Argentina and Jamaica.
MIA: As we got to know these kids, these orphans who had so little, Jenna and I wondered, How does this happen? How did we get so lucky? None of us chooses to be born into loving families, with parents who are our best friends.
JENNA: Some of what we saw was very grim. There was such poverty, such violence. When we were in Jamaica, we learned of people who were stoned to death, just for having AIDS. But there were also flashes of inspiration. We met children living in poverty who had such resilience! They wanted an education. They refused to give up.
MIA: And then, at a conference of women and kids with AIDS and HIV, we saw Ana. [Ana is not her real name; it's a pseudonym to protect her identity.]
JENNA: She was this absolutely beautiful 17-year-old girl, and she stood up with her baby in her arms, in front of all these people, and said with great conviction: "I want everyone here to know: We're living with HIV; we're not dying of it!" Mia and I were almost in tears.
MIA: Her story was so compelling, so deep. Ana was born HIV positive; her mother and father had both died of AIDS by the time she was in sixth grade. She had to keep her own HIV status secret to avoid brutal discrimination. She was sexually abused by her step-grandfather, was treated harshly by relatives, and lived in a group home, all before falling in love with a boy and, at 16, having a baby girl, Beatriz [also a pseudonym]—whose HIV status is, so far, fortunately negative.
Jenna and Mia documented Ana's story for the UNICEF website.
JENNA: We wanted to use her story to make young people knowledgeable, to save lives. In that part of the world, people think if they have HIV, they're going to die anyway, so they don't get tested for the virus. But if they do get tested, because of the availability of medicine—which Ana has always taken—it's possible to live a full life.
And then there was Ana's amazing attitude. One day she saw that I had written the word enfermedad (sickness). She looked at my binder and asked, "Enfermedad?!" And I'm, "What? Did I spell it wrong?" But it wasn't the spelling—it was the word. She said, "HIV is not a sickness. It's the situation of my life."
So she really taught us about hope and courage—especially since, where she lives, if people knew she had HIV, she'd be kicked out of school. People would yell at her and ask her to move out of her community. She could be physically hurt.
I wanted something bigger to come out of our conversations with Ana. Mia said, "One way we can do this is a book." And I said, "I just don't know if I'm competent. I think I should go to graduate school first." But Mia had read my piece for UNICEF and said to me, "Jenna, you are ready."
One weekend I called home to tell my parents about our plan for a book. My dad was out riding his mountain bike, so I got my mom on the phone, and I talked to my dad later. They were both very encouraging. They said, "Work as hard as you can."
MIA: In a way we had already prepared ourselves to do this book. We read a lot that summer: Latin American authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, and then we moved on to Czech literature, then Japanese and then American. We read Susan Sontag's On Photography.
JENNA: And we're dying to read her book about AIDS. I read 14 books when we were in Latin America.
When Jenna nervously sat down to write her proposal for a book about Ana, she turned to a valuable resource.
MIA: The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron—it's amazing. It gives you a plan for daily journal writing and other exercises to tap your creativity.
JENNA: Mia gave the book to me for my birthday that year. She brought out a creativity in me that I didn't know I had.
KATE JACKSON, editor-in-chief at HarperCollins Children's Books: I've been meeting with children's book authors for 16 years, and I can't remember a time when I listened to someone with as much passion as Jenna. She started talking about Ana and she probably didn't stop for 15 minutes. We signed up the book in January 2007.
JENNA: Working on the book, in our little apartment in Panama on the edge of the rain forest, Mia and I lived a romantic, bohemian existence. We would wake up early and put on just-barely-awake music: Nick Drake…
MIA: ….and Thelonious Monk…
JENNA: …and read our copies of The Artist's Way and write in our journals and drink our coffee. We had nicknames for each other: Mia called me Augustus and I called her Junior, or we would call each other esposo and esposa,/em>: Spanish for husband and wife.
MIA: Then we would go for a long run. And I'd be thinking, Since I can't reveal Ana's identity, how do I get the message across in my photographs without showing her face? A bed, a shadow, her baby's hand against her mouth? It was a challenge. But I had Jenna's eloquent words to enhance the reality.
JENNA: I'm a perfectionist—I could rewrite forever. I would sit there with my big, black, hole-punched binder of my transcripts of my interviews with Ana—I'm a weird, O.C.D., organized person [laughs] —and I would write for 14 hours straight. I would work every weekend. I never did anything else.
MIA: The book was her main priority. Jenna has the most amazing focus and drive.
JENNA: One morning at 6:45, walking to the UNICEF office to write, I called my mom. She asked, "Jenna…are you happy?" I said, "Yes, I'm happy." As intense as it was, I loved what I was doing. Sometimes, though, I'd get frustrated and just lose it. I'd say, "It's not working! It's no good!" Mia's calm manner was good for me.
MIA: I was just blown away by her writing.
BARBARA BUSH: I read the drafts of Ana's Story that Jenna e-mailed me, and I was especially touched by the scenes of Ana and her sister, and Ana and her father—close relationships like Jenna and I have, and like the relationship we have with our father. Some of those passages drove me to tears.
MIA: Jenna would be working so much. I was like, "You need a break!" And then we'd go to this funny exercise class…
JENNA: …called "Clase de Jimmy." It was a gym like Jane Fonda's. Jimmy was this huge Panamanian American guy, big and muscular. He looked like an ex-Marine. It was boot camp—we'd leave sweating. He would make me dance by myself because he'd say, "You're white; you can't dance!"
MIA: He only played old songs. He played "Jump (For My Love)" over and over.
JENNA: So Mia and I made him a better CD: Outkast, James Brown, The Strokes, Shakira, the Jackson Five's "ABC."
While Jenna and Mia worked on the book, Jenna made sure Ana was prepared for the deluge of publicity to come: The publishers were planning a huge print order of 500,000 (most books rate a first printing of about 10,000 or fewer).
JENNA: I'd ask Mia, "She knows, right?" — meaning, she knows who my dad is. Mia said she told her, and her reaction was, "Oh, she lives in a big house, huh?" You have to understand, Ana doesn't live in a world with wall-to-wall cable, she doesn't read newspapers every day. I found most children I talked to in Latin America didn't know that I was the President's daughter, either. (And when they did find out, they were like, "Weird! Hey, do you live in the White House? And I'd say, "Noooo," and they were, "Oh, OK," and that was it.)
I said, "Ana, I have to tell you something. It's going to be a big book because my dad is jefe del gobierno—head of government." She said, "Oh, I don't care." She still didn't get it. When my father was in South America last winter on business, and he was in all the newspapers, Ana said, "Bush! Bush is here!" And I said, "Ana, you know that he's my father." And she said, "Oh, I didn't put it together." And then that was it; it didn't change anything.
Jenna and Mia are now touring the country speaking about Ana's Story. One question that's sure to come up is whether the book's message about the importance of condoms conflicts with the abstinence-only policy promoted by her father's administration. Will there be a dust-up on the issue?
JENNA: I don't think so. The book's message is the exact same thing my mother said when she was in Africa recently—A, B, C: abstinence, be faithful and condom usage. Abstinence is important; if you don't want any chance of getting a disease, then don't have sex. But if you're HIV positive and you have sex, you must always use a condom. You can't talk about being a teenage mother and stopping the spread of AIDS without talking about condoms.
MIA: Now that the book is done, I've been hired as a photographer for a new company called Kai, which was founded by two young female MBAs; Kai leads innovative young professionals on trips to developing countries around the world to work with nonprofit groups. I'm also doing freelance photography in New York.
It was so great to work on the book with Augustus—I mean Jenna. We had the chance to inspire and support each other.
Today Jenna is working on a second book, for children, with her mother, Laura. Her immediate plans also include preparing for her wedding to Hager—and perhaps in the future, kids. Even so, she says she'll keep writing.
JENNA: For my future, I like the idea of blending writing with my work as an educator. Children have so much to say, but sometimes they don't get a chance to speak. Mia and I learned so much from Ana. I hope she learned from us, too.
Senior contributing editor Sheila Weller's new book, Girls Like Us, comes out in 2008.
