Child's play

British author and illustrator Lauren Child. Photo / Supplied

Lauren Child is a publishing phenomenon, as anyone who has had dealings with children in the past decade can hardly have failed to notice. Since she published Clarice Bean, That's Me 10 years ago, her picture books with their cartoony figures, collage of textures and colours, swooping typography and comically childish cadences have been enchanting children and, just as importantly, holding the interest of their parents.

Child's books have sold more than three million copies and been translated into 30 languages. She recently signed a new publishing deal for a reported £1 million ($2.5 million). More than 80 episodes of a television series based on her Charlie and Lola books have been created. And the associated merchandising — stationery, bags, clothes, furnishings — is ubiquitous.

Yet the woman behind this industry of illustration and words remains a bit of a mystery. For one thing, her age was reported as being 39 this January and 41 by March; as 36 in 2002 and 37 in 2005. She tells me she was born in 1965. For another, her name is not Lauren. "That is true," she admits. So, her real name is? "Oh well, I was christened Helen."

I assume Lauren is a nom de plume, but apparently not. "I changed my name. It wasn't anything to do with writing." Eventually, she says: "The thing is — the reason I don't particularly talk about it — it upsets my parents a bit. There's no weird thing. No one's ever asked me about it before. For them, you can imagine, if a child changed her name ..."

Changing your name is a highly self-conscious thing to do, as well as liable to upset your parents. It's also a bit odd if your name is as unexceptionable as Helen. But there is something guarded about Child, aside from the changed name. In the publicity photo for her Clarice Bean books, she sits with shoulders hunched and hands between her knees, as if she's trying to squeeze herself into the narrowest space possible.

In the publicity shot for her book coming out next month, Who Wants To Be A Poodle, I Don't, she sits with hands gripping the side of her low chair, knees together, feet splayed. She looks younger than her years, artfully artless. It is fair enough that she might want to retain her privacy, yet her books contain numerous teasing personal references. She includes photographs of her friends in the copy and the dedications. There are little in-jokes: "For Perry, with a squillion thanks for a zillion favours. (P.S. I hope this typeface isn't a style crime.)"

There are frequent Danish allusions — a nod, one must assume, to her ex-boyfriend, Soren Munk, a Danish news cameraman and musician. Clarice's mum speaks Danish, while Lola's pretend friend is called Soren Lorenson. (One blogging mum, noting the author's childlessness, speculated that there was something Freudian about the homonym Soren Lauren's son.)

Child herself has said she thinks of Charlie and Lola as Danish. But these tantalising glimpses into what seems to be a glamorous and arty life turn out to be a bit like burlesque — she whirls away mysteriously, giving nothing significant away. I meet her at her stylish 1930s house in north London. The doorbell, like Clarice's, is broken. The whole ground floor is knocked through and the room is reminiscent of one of her books — cushions in lime green and shocking pink, exotic lampshades, fantastical curtains like children's paper cutouts, bright china — everything tossed together with the confidence of someone sure of her eye, unafraid of colour, texture or pattern.

Child (the surname is her own) is very tall and pretty in a grey silk blouse which brings out the blue-grey of her big eyes, with a diamante clip in her long blonde hair. She chooses to sit across the table rather than on the sofa, and seems compressed, formal, except when she is talking about illustration and becomes more animated and self-forgetful.

The middle of three daughters, she grew up in Marlborough, south-west England, where her father was head of art at Marlborough College and her mother a primary school teacher. After the local state school, she went to Marlborough in the sixth form (at that stage they didn't take girls lower down the school) and then to art college to study for a BA in illustration.

"I didn't learn anything at Manchester. I left after a year. They didn't teach us that the type must never cross the gutter in a book or the picture fall into it. I didn't know there were 32 pages in the average picture book, or about four-colour printing, or that you can't use coloured type. The atmosphere was kind of bullying, and I thought, 'You know what? I don't really want to be told any more that I'm a soft southern girl who doesn't know she's born'."

So she left and applied for courses in various disciplines, from textiles to interior design. "I just didn't know what I wanted to do. It was the most horrible time, being terribly indecisive. It was all too much of a burden. I kind of messed it up." She ended up on a course in decorative arts in London. "I thought it would be very practical and useful, which it hasn't been." And when it was finished, she still wasn't any clearer about what she wanted to do.

She painted spots in some of Damien Hirst's spot paintings, made furniture, decorated china, dressed windows at British department store Harvey Nichols and set up a lampshade company called Chandeliers For The People. She also drew some picture books, but they were all turned down.

"I'd come up with a little idea and take it in and someone would say, 'I don't like the way you've done the nose or the ears,' or 'It's quite a nice idea, but look at the ending.' And then they'd show me what was a good book. You're continually rejected because you're not like somebody else and, of course, what they're all looking for is a new voice, something slightly different."

Clarice Bean turned out to be exactly that, although Child didn't originally intend her to be the basis for a writing career so much as a marketing vehicle. "Clarice was an exercise in getting something out there, because I was interested in doing animation or designing products for children. I saw it as a practical stepping-stone: if people could see I could do this, they might pick it up and do something with it."

Clarice is the put-upon but feisty third child of four, offering a commentary on her chaotic and noisy family. The initial aim seems to have been for her to sketch the characters of her family and be irresistibly cute: "I do balancing, and smiling in tights. That's a very important part of acrobatics." Whimsical and episodic, the book focused much more on character than plot and did the rounds for four years until one publisher helped give it shape and a rudimentary story, after which it was picked up by a publishing house, Orchard Books.

Clarice Bean, That's Me was followed by two more picture books featuring the little girl with a tiny mouth, baby cauliflower nose, huge eyes and childish malapropisms ("No ideas are coming into my head. My mind is a blanket.") — My Uncle Is A Hunkle and What Planet Are You from Clarice Bean? But she never did become an animation. An option was taken but never exercised, Child says, because the books proved too wordy and complex. "There are so many characters, too many things that can go wrong."

Instead, three more Clarice books followed (chapter books, or short novels). "I was finding it really difficult to manage the amount of words I was writing for the picture books. It's very difficult to write about someone like Clarice without adding a lot of words, because it's all about how she expresses herself." The chapter books have got better as they have gone on, although what is funny and charming in 800 words can sometimes spill over into twee cutesiness at 40,000 — though it should be said there are legions of Child's fans who would not agree.

In 2000, Child published the award-winning and wonderful I Will Never Not Ever Eat A Tomato, featuring a brother and sister called Charlie and Lola. Aimed at younger children, the Charlie and Lola books are simpler, both graphically and because they have fewer characters, and Child felt less uncomfortable about relinquishing control of them to animators.

The energy of her illustrations and the charm of her writing can be seen by comparing them with the Charlie and Lola television spinoffs which lack the originals' inventiveness and wit. Child admits that the virtual puppets of the show "are beautifully done, but the shape of their head is always the same, their eyes are the same — you will not get any kind of strangeness to them."

Child worked as a consultant on the Charlie and Lola TV series — which, including pre-production, amounted to "a couple of days a week for four to five years." She also gets what she describes as "a small percentage" from the spinoff books, "though nothing like I get on my own books. I am just one of many people who has dibs on those books. And I don't think I will ever see any money on the merchandising. I don't want to get into a slanging match about the deal, but I understand now how it's possible not to make any money from something you've originated."

Undeterred, she is pressing on with her own projects, including her new book, Who Wants To Be A Poodle, I Don't, to be released next month. The book features a poodle called Trixie Twinkle Toes who wants to paddle in puddles but is kept in chic French style by her owner and constantly taken to beauty parlours, a setting that provides ample opportunity for Child to indulge her enthusiasm for chandeliers, sprigged wallpapers and lots of pink.

There's also the odd grown-up joke. One of the backgrounds is a newspaper, full of stories about missing dogs ("Police are following all leads"). Child is also is working on a series of chapter books, featuring Clarice Bean's favourite literary heroine, Ruby Redfort. In the Clarice novels, the excerpts from the Ruby books are, Child says, "meant to be absolute rubbish"; they are pulpy and eminently skippable, so it will be interesting to see how she manages to inject her characteristic note of gambolling caprice into Ruby.

She acknowledges that since the Ruby books are detective novels, she has had to work more than she is used to on plot. All this activity has not, she insists, made her rich. "I do very well, but it's not insane. I can't imagine not working, for example. When my royalties come in for one picture book, you can't live on that money. "Having a backlist — I've done 26 books — then you can live off it for a while. It makes me laugh, though, when I see headlines about 'multimillionaire Lauren Child'. It's been a slow process. Other people seemed to know what they wanted to do and they trained in the right thing — but I do think it was an advantage to have things rather grim for a while.

"Lots of famous children's writers are doing phenomenally well, so people assume it's an easy way to make money, but I can remember being absolutely thrilled when I found myself earning £15,000. It didn't suddenly go whoosh with mad amounts of money." Child's picture books are stylish objects to own. They have the glamorous unpredictability of fashionable clothes and furnishings, and Child includes "going to shops or someone's house" among the influences on her work, along with Matisse and Braque.

Yet her writing is emphatically not contemporary, in the sense that it's littered with words like "completely" and "utterly" and it is quite difficult to imagine it pronounced in anything other than middle-class tones, perhaps in a more homogenous past — her own childhood in the 1970s, perhaps. "I don't mind if people say that," she says. "I'm not sure I agree with it. The Charlie and Lola spinoff books are not bought so much by the middle classes. They're on TV [and DVDs], so they have more mass appeal. But I didn't want to use speech that would date."

It is customary in interviews with Child to ask if she doesn't want to settle down and have children of her own, so I do, although it feels like a mean question. Her current boyfriend is a barrister. "Well, you never know," she says. "I try very hard — one of my terrible vices is always to tunnel into the future and think 'what I want to do next', a bit like if I'm working on a book I'll often think what I'm going to do after it. So I'm trying to be much more 'do what you're doing now' kind of thing. I'm happy now, so stop thinking about other things."

There is something inextinguishably childlike about Child. Her voice is light, the vowels not quite in grown-up shapes; she has been described as having a lisp, though that isn't quite right. She has her characters' uncertainty and tentativeness, and also their bravado. Some of the connection to children comes, she says "from my own childhood, the feelings of childhood, memories — but it's not just that. I can go to the supermarket today and suddenly get that feeling of looking in your basket and there's something terribly sad about it. We're only one step away from childhood, really; it's just that we have a bit more control, and we're maybe better at putting on a front."

Like Lola, who is prepared to eat mashed potato only when she has redefined it as "cloud fluff from the pointiest peak of Mt Fuji", Child seems sensitive to the possibility that if she doesn't order the world in a way that works for her, she could get squashed by it. Her books reveal a person thrilled by surfaces, by shapes and pattern, who is capable of writing spirited and playful words. But her characters often look alarmed. Even at their boldest, they are pensive.

I leave her feeling the source of her success might be quite uncomfortable; that she connects so well with children because she taps into something that many grown-ups are rather better at repressing.

- Observer

* Charlie and Lola: Say Cheese (Penguin, $25) is out now. Who Wants to Be a Poodle, I Don't (Penguin) is out next month.