How Jenna Bush Hager Became a Publishing Kingmaker

She is a premium name dropper almost out of habit, less boastful than thorough, ticking through the luminaries who populate her days.

“I actually did see Seinfeld yesterday …”

“I locked eyes with George Strait …”

“And Oprah said that to me …” (They text.)

She is a reader of zigzagging tastes: memoir, mystery, poetry, period plots.

The themes that animate her can seem telling.

“I see a consistent interest,” said Charmaine Wilkerson, whose debut novel, “Black Cake,” made the cut last February, “in family relationships.”

Unwitting public figure

It was not the attention that bothered her, exactly.

“As a little kid, if you read her diary, she would say she wanted to be an entertainer,” Barbara Bush said, recalling her twin’s ill-fated covers from “Les Miserables.”

But why a teenage Jenna Bush found herself in the papers befuddled her then. “Today has been a hard day for me,” she wrote in her journal in May 1996 (and published in a 2017 joint memoir with her sister). The entry was in response to a news article about the Bush children — then the daughters of the Texas governor — planning to enroll at Austin High School. “The thing that really sucks,” she scribbled, “is I’ll be known for ‘Jenna Bush’ the thing instead of Jenna Bush the person.”

The shorthand in the political press held that Barbara was their mother’s daughter, Yale-bound and reserved, and Jenna was their father’s: the extrovert, the cut-up, the high-school senior named most likely to trip across the stage at graduation.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/business/jenna-bush-hager-book-club.html