First Look: Jenna Bush's book 'Ana's Story'
Jul 2, 2007, 06:00 AM | by Gary Susman
Categories: Books
First daughter Jenna Bush's nonfiction book Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope won't be published until October, but the galleys have just crossed our desk, and we are, well, perplexed. The 25-year-old has said she based the book on a series of interviews with a 17-year-old, HIV-positive unwed mother she befriended during her stint as a UNICEF volunteer in Latin America last year. The resulting book, aimed at teens and young adults, means to educate and inspire, but it shocked us for a couple of reasons.
First is its sexual frankness.The book ends with a lengthy appendix that includes several tips on how teens can protect themselves against AIDS and other STDs, and it includes sentences like this one: "Whether or not you choose to wait until your married or older to become sexually active, give yourself as much time as you need to make a well-thought-out and mature decision." (Since the book is still in galley form, the final text may read differently.) It's hard enough to imagine President Bush signing off on his daughter's decision to take an unpaid position with the dreaded United Nations, but to have her return and repudiate the administration's position that the only kind of sex education kids should be taught is abstinence-only — why, next thing you know, she'll be marching against the war and the repeal of the inheritance tax.
Even more shocking: the book is good.
Maybe too good. In fact, though there's no ghostwriter listed, we have a hard time imagining she wrote it herself. Not because nothing in her past antics suggested she had a thoughtful, intellectual bent, or because she occasionally uses big words like "dichotomy" or references to the paintings of Gauguin, but because the book is too smooth. Its language has a literary purity, and its narrative flows seamlessly back and forth between the interior and exterior lives of "Ana" and the people around her, all of whom vividly remember offhand details of events going back to their early childhoods or verbatim quotations from long-ago conversations. It reads, in other words, like a very good novel for young teens; it's hard to say even if "Ana" and the others are real people, since the author has changed all their names (to protect their privacy, she says) and doesn't even name the city and country they live in.
Is it churlish for us to think this way? Suppose the whole book is a big fraud — doesn't it still have the potential to educate large numbers of teens? Then again, wasn't that the argument that was made in defense of James Frey? What say you, PopWatchers?
UPDATE: D'oh! Commenters, don't be so quick to blame that "your/you're" error on Jenna Bush. That may have been my own transcription typo, not hers; I'll have to go back to the galley and check. But even if that's the book's error, remember that this is a galley and that the text shouldn't be considered final until the book comes out this fall. Then you may nitpick the book's grammar and spelling to your heart's content.
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