Jenna's Story: A New Author Steps Forth

The pair set out to document the lives of young people who are living in what UNICEF staffers call "exclusion" -- meaning that, for a variety of reasons, they have been marginalized and don't receive basic education, social services or health care. The idea was to vivify the statistics with short "life histories."

But after Bush started talking to the vibrant young single mother she calls Ana, she got more ambitious.

They met at a U.N.-hosted gathering. "She was 17," Bush says, "and she looked so young and fresh-faced." At the same time there was "an air about her that was so much older." (Because young people face discrimination if their HIV-positive status is revealed, Bush changed names and some details. She doesn't name the country where Ana lives, though it has been previously reported to be Panama.)

The more Bush learned about Ana's life, the more she thought it was something that should be "brought back to the kids in the United States."

"Jenna came to me and said, 'I want to write a book about this girl,' " recalls Mark Connolly, UNICEF's regional adviser for HIV/AIDS. Connolly encouraged her.

"It's a unique story," he says, "but there are Anas all over the world." A book would also highlight the fact that -- while the crisis in Africa is more horrific and thus better known -- "we have a serious heterosexual AIDS epidemic in Latin America," where an estimated 1.6 million adults and children are infected.

After talking to Connolly, Bush called home.

Laura Bush, too, encouraged her. She says she wasn't surprised her daughter wanted to write a book, because Jenna "was always interested in writing." But Jenna Bush recalls that her mother did have a question about going public.

"Do you know what you're getting yourself into?" she asked.

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Bush and Baxter met with Ana regularly for six months. They cut her hair and talked about boyfriends. Ana called them "gringas" and made fun of their Spanish. Then, at some point, Bush would get out her tape recorder and the mood would change.

She wanted to tell her story -- she was "extremely open to us," Baxter says -- but it was hard.