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Biography & Autobiography. Family & Relationships. Nonfiction. HTML:The former first daughters share intimate stories and reflections from the Texas countryside to the storied halls of the White House and beyond. Born into a political dynasty, Jenna and Barbara Bush grew up in the public eye. As small children, they watched their grandfather become president; just twelve years later they stood by their father's side when he took the same oath. They spent their college years watched over by Secret Service agents and became fodder for the tabloids, with teenage mistakes making national headlines. But the tabloids didn't tell the whole story. In Sisters First, Jenna and Barbara take readers on a revealing, thoughtful, and deeply personal tour behind the scenes of their lives, as they share stories about their family, their unexpected adventures, their loves and losses, and the sisterly bond that means everything to them.… (more)
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Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush, with foreword by Laura Bush
Sisters First: Stories from Our Wild and Wonderful Life
Grand Central Publishing
Hardcover, 978-1-5387-1141-5 (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 256 pgs., $28.00
October 24, 2017
Sisters First:
A very pretty book, the memoir includes many cute, candid photos of the sisters and their parents, as well as the extended Bush clan. In a nice touch, it also includes reproductions of letters (grandmother and former U.S. first lady Barbara Bush’s nickname is the “Enforcer”), texts, emails (grandfather and former U.S. president George H. W. Bush signs himself “Grampster”), and even wedding toasts. The title is borrowed from the concluding line in Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.”
The memoir is arranged loosely in chronological order, but more importantly by subject, the text reading like essays, almost like diary entries. Subjects include the sisters’ experiences of Secret Service protection; the election night of 2000; campaigning in 2004; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; and thoughts on the Iraq War. They don’t shy away from their father’s former alcohol problems or their own youthful transgressions.
Jenna and Barbara are fraternal twins who arrived a few weeks early and were named for their grandmothers, and whose earliest memories are from Midland, Texas, and Kennebunkport, Maine. The sisters’ different personalities come through clearly.
Barbara, the “little girl [with a] big name” (pizza places would hang up on her when she called to order), writes lyrical descriptions of Maine childhood summers, movingly of a teenage friend’s suicide, hilariously of living with Secret Service protection (“Who better to ask for male relationship advice than the two guys sitting in the front seat of the car with you?”). She debunks assumptions that policies and opinions are passed down genetically (“political DNA”).
Jenna tells of the sisters’ first separation when they were six years old and went to Camp Longhorn during the summer, her confusion at seeing the Grampster on the cover of Newsweek branded with “Wimp,” and that time her date (now her husband) ran out of gas on an incline and rolled backwards into the Secret Service’s armored Suburban. Jenna endears with self-deprecating asides.
Now Jenna is married with two small daughters of her own, reporting for NBC; Barbara is the CEO and cofounder of Global Health Corps, which works for health equity around the world because “health is a human right”; the sisters live four blocks from each other in New York City.
And, y’all, the White House is haunted.
Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.