Annie F. Downs Shares Stories of Her Life and Faith

Annie F. Downs cringes when she describes her younger self. “I was not great at being a teenager,” she says. “Some of my friends knew how to dress, they knew how to be cool, they knew what to say to boys, I just didn’t know any of that.” The term “late bloomer” didn’t feel apt at the time because she worried she would never bloom at all.

By her 20s, however, Ms. Downs felt not just older but wiser, and suspected her stories could help ease the growing pains of others. She scribbled her thoughts on weekends and printed them out for the teenage girls who came to her Bible study group on Monday nights in Marietta, Ga. “By the end of that first semester, one of them said, ‘Hey, will you print one more of these and staple it like a book so I can give it to my friend?’ And I said, ‘Oh, did I just write a book?” she recalls.