Teen idol: Jacqueline Wilson. Photo / Getty Images
At 78, the former children’s laureate talks about her new book, Think Again, and the relationships that have shaped her life.
Jacqueline Wilson is furious. Well, as furious as the slight, charming 78-year-old author can get. I’ve asked if she’s considered retiring.
“I’ve been making up stories since I was six years old,” Wilson says, gesticulating with her chunky silver rings and sky blue nail polish. “It’s become such a part of me that even if I lose the ability to write coherently or I go completely out of fashion, I’d still be making stories up in my head. I can’t help it.”
Wilson “going out of fashion” is unlikely. Her debut novel, Hide and Seek, came out in 1972 and she has not looked back. Her stories of children and teenagers from council estates, care homes and dysfunctional families stand out among the usual cosy childhood tales of happily married parents and fairytale houses, and from 2005 until 2007 she was the children’s laureate. She writes two novels a year, amounting to more than 100 books, including her breakthrough in 1991, The Story of Tracy Beaker, and the more controversial Dustbin Baby (2008), about an abandoned child, and Midnight (2003), a story of sibling emotional abuse.
“My characters are often on the periphery of life — they’re not conventional,” Wilson says. “I’m not a desperately conventional person myself, so that’s what I feel comfortable writing about. And it’s irritating to read about smug, successful people.”
Like many millennial women, I was helped by Wilson’s books through the tricky early teenage years. When I told friends I was interviewing her, they gasped with excitement and nostalgia, even more so when I told them that her new novel, Think Again, is a follow-up to her Girls series, but for adults. The series focused on the lives of 13-year-old Ellie Allard and her best friends Magda and Nadine as they navigate boys, body image and complex families. The idea to revisit the series came to Wilson when her daughter Emma, 57, a professor at Cambridge University, asked what she thought the characters would be doing now.
“Teenage girls were quite different then,” Wilson says when we meet at the Foundling Museum in London, the inspiration for her 2009 historical novel Hetty Feather. “If I were writing about teenage girls now, I’d try not to make them quite so obsessed with boys or their looks.”
In Think Again Ellie has just turned 40. She’s facing a career crisis, single motherhood and questions over her sexuality. After a passionate affair with her former male art teacher Gary, she falls in love with a woman, Alice.
In many ways Think Again echoes Wilson’s life, although she swears that none of her work is autobiographical. She left home aged 17 — from “a perfectly respectable council estate” in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey — and moved to Dundee to be a writer at Jackie magazine. There she met William Millar Wilson, a printer, and made the “incredibly stupid” decision to get married aged 19. By 21 she had given birth to Emma.
“I thought, ‘He’ll do,’” she says of her ex-husband. “We were too young and entirely different people, but I was determined to make it work because my own parents’ marriage was such a disaster.”
Eventually her husband left her for another woman and the pair divorced. Wilson spent six years alone until she met Trish Beswick, a bookshop manager, with whom she has been in a relationship for 22 years.
“It’s lovely when you go from OK to really happy rather than the other way around,” Wilson says. “To have somebody kind and funny, who loves reading and looks after me … to find ‘the one’.”
In 2020 Wilson went public with her relationship with Beswick. To many it seemed like a revelatory “coming out” moment. To Wilson it was no such thing. “I was never in the so-called closet,” she says. “Our friends, family and people in the book world all knew we were partners.”
Wilson “came out” because she was publishing Love Frankie, a book about two girls falling in love, and thought it “seemed sensible” to tell the world she was in a relationship with a woman. Wilson says she is “not somebody who labels themselves. It doesn’t matter to me what gender a person is.”
Could people knowing she was in a same-sex relationship have had an impact on the early years of her career? “It could’ve probably been slightly more of an issue, yes, certainly more than nowadays,” she says.
Think Again is a big leap away from Wilson’s usual child-friendly writing. There are graphic sex scenes as Wilson describes Ellie sleeping with Gary for the first time and her fantasies of Alice. There are also references to sexual violence, when Nadine is choked by a man she’s dating. Wilson tackles the complexities of middle-age as Ellie struggles with empty nest syndrome when her daughter moves to university, and the guilt and worry over her ageing father’s heart attack.
“Some people thought I was walking quite a tightrope as to what you can or can’t say in children’s books,” she says. “So it was liberating to feel that there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t write about.”
Is that a goodbye to children’s books, then? “I’m not leaving children’s books behind, I’m just writing adult novels,” she says. “It’s like having two special holidays a year in very different places. What’s that old cliché? Change is as good as a rest. And it was.”
Wilson says she “didn’t have the cosiest of childhoods”. She’s the only child of Biddy, a clerical worker, and Harry, a draughtsman, then a civil servant. Her mother was “a terrible snob” and her parents “always seemed to be on the brink of divorce” , although she believes the dysfunction is why her work resonates with so many people.
“It’s good for a writer to feel comfortable in many different types of backgrounds,” she says. “That’s partly why my books became successful: because they were a little bit different.”
Wilson and Beswick’s life is far removed from the complicated lives of her characters. They live in East Sussex with a cat, two dogs and a chicken. In the mornings Beswick tends to the animals while Wilson sits in bed and writes in her pyjamas.
She calls 78 “a grim age”, but she’s healthy — after two scares. In 2008 she was diagnosed with heart failure and in 2015 had a kidney transplant. Now she has a defibrillator in her chest and tells me about her “horrible veins: you can see because they’re all blown”.
“Everyone thought I would slow down on dialysis because I couldn’t type,” she says. “But Trish typed out one of my books, Opal Plumstead, while I dictated. It was a real act of love because it happened to be the longest one.”
They rarely argue — “the good thing about a relationship when you’re much older is you realise quite soon that you can say anything to each other” — and don’t do Netflix, although they are fans of Schitt’s Creek and Heartstopper, which they “watch at our gay friends’ house down in the village” due to “lousy” broadband.
She’s looking forward to the new series of Strictly Come Dancing despite recent controversy and allegations of abusive behaviour. “It’s a shame, but I still think it’s a fantastic programme,” she says. “And how does anybody who hasn’t taken part in it know what goes on?”
Cancel culture concerns her. She finds cries to boycott books in reaction to their authors’ beliefs “witch-hunty” and thinks “people are very extreme. If you don’t like a book or an author, that’s a personal choice.”
When Wilson’s not writing she loves to read. She digs around in her tote bag to show me her present favourite book, the “witty” Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe.
She worries that children’s books are becoming too simple, comparing them to “a snack rather than a delicious, wholesome meal. Reading is almost as important as food because it’s food for the brain. I think it matters,” she says.
Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson (Bantam) is on sale now.
Written by: Roisin Kelly
© The Times of London
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