Jenna Bush Hager revealed she almost had the opportunity to meet Toni Morrison, an author whose work she says “transformed” her when she was a young woman.

Speaking on Monday’s broadcast of Today With Hoda & Jenna, Bush Hager recalled the first-ever interview she did when she was 26 years old with Diane Sawyer.

“Once when I was interviewed by Diane Sawyer, the first interview I ever did, she asked me during it, ‘Who would you be starstruck [by] if they walked into this room?'” she recalled. “And I think she was expecting me to say like Justin Timberlake, you know this was a long time ago, so somebody [who is a] heartthrob. And I said Toni Morrison, and she was shocked.”

Bush Hager recalled that the Emmy Award-winning journalist asked her if she had any plans after the interview was over, to which she replied she had to travel back to Washington, D.C., from New York City where they were conducting the interview.

“She said, ‘Too bad, I was going to surprise you,'” Bush Hager said. “She was friends with Toni Morrison, [and] she said, ‘I was gonna have her waiting at my apartment and we were going to have margaritas.'”

Hoda Kotb could not believe Bush Hager didn’t take the opportunity to meet the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, who later passed away in 2019.

“I don’t know, I had something but I wish I did it because I never got to meet her but I would have,” Bush Hager lamented.

The Today Show host said reading Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as a teenager helped her realize “books can create empathy, and can make you live inside somebody’s shoes you’ve never walked in.”

“Pecola, who is the main character, was so different than I was and yet I felt so moved by her story,” Bush Hager said. “I was like, oh my god, I feel like I want to talk to everybody about how she lived and who she was.”

Kotb, on the other hand, said the book that changed her life was Living, Loving & Learning by Leo Buscaglia. She joked that she was so obsessed with it when she was in college that she would read it to her sorority sisters.

“They were going to the Sigma Chi happy hour and I would be like, ‘Everybody gather around,'” she said.

“Don’t you love that you were the exact same person at 19 [years old]?” Bush Hager remarked.

Today with Jenna and Hoda airs on weekdays at 10/9c on NBC.