Jenna Bush’s life-changing friendship

Interview excerpt

By Sheila Weller

updated 8:06 a.m. ET Oct. 1, 2007

Jenna Bush has a fast, excited, husky-voiced way of talking, a genuine curiosity about the person she’s talking to, and a charming, self-deprecating sense of humor. Face-to-face with her headlong, unpretentious personality, you can’t help thinking: This is the daughter of the most powerful man on earth?

On this sunny morning, Jenna, 25, is sitting with her best friend, photographer Mia Baxter, 25, discussing their 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, 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. 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.”

Mia: When Jenna and I met, I was just falling in love with photography. 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 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.

Becoming a first daughter
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.

Mia: Being the President’s daughter was new for her. She wanted to just be Jenna but she’d be walking across campus with the security guys behind her. It was an adjustment.

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. And she was so open to feedback and criticism.

Mia: Jenna and I pushed each other: Keep writing! Keep taking pictures! Jenna showed me a beautiful story she wrote for Laura Furman’s class about her sister. I remember her songlike words, 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. 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 fiancé, 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. 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 each other. If I didn’t like something a boy she was dating was doing, I’d tell her.

Jenna: By our junior year in college, 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: We’d talk about someday putting my photography and her writing together.

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