When word first circulated last week that Co-First Daughter Jenna Bush was shopping a memoir, we ignored it – well, at least I did – because I didn’t expect there to be much publisher interest in a book about her reported working with underprivileged children in Central & South America. Drunken shenanigans? Oh yeah. But this topic would die a slow death on the proposal table.
But, as Radar reports, it’s done anything but. According to Jeff Bercovici, Jenna took a meeting with HarperCollins president Jane Friedman last week to pitch the project, and as the auction price climbs, that publisher is still in the running while Simon & Schuster has backed off. Meanwhile, the embryonic project is already drawing interest from the major TV networks’ news divisions, which have been frantically calling around to the publishing houses trying to find out where the book will land in hopes of locking up the exclusive on it. “It’s something everybody’s going to compete for,” says one network insider.
Perhaps Jenna’s agent might explain the flurry of interest: can anyone really, truly turn down Bob Barnett?