It is January 2nd 2001. With my fluffy Tracy Beaker gel-pen, wearing Tracy Beaker socks under Sketchers trainers (the sort that light up as you walk – never been prouder of a piece of clothing, never will), I am filling in the ‘My Hopes and Dreams’ page of my Tracy Beaker Diary. There, between ‘beat Anna Murray at swimming races’ and ‘pink Tamagotchi’ I write: ‘meet Jacqueline Wilson’. To me, she is the last word in literary genius.
Skip to 2013: I am talking to Wilson on the phone, and the experience is living up to every seven-year-old expectation. She gives elegant, articulate answers, using the word ‘lovely’ at least nine times over the course of the interview and in the process demonstrating how ‘lovely’ she herself seems. At the end of our call she recommends me books (Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, if you’re interested), asks me what I want to do when I grow up and tells me how much she enjoyed my questions. I feel like high-fiving my Inner Child.
Wilson’s works sell in their millions. With the exception of JK Rowling, she is the UK’s most prolific children’s author, appointed Children’s Laureate in 2005 and made a Dame three years later. Her books have been adapted for stage and screen and her Nick Sharrat-drawn characters have adorned the usual collection of Paperchase pencil cases, M&S underwear and Argos lunch boxes. There exist at least three spoof Tracy Beaker Twitter accounts.
Her distinctive brand of fiction bases its plots in ‘real-life’ issues, addressing everything from estranged dads to evil stepmothers, bullying best friends to acrimonious divorces. She’s killed off mums, dads, sisters, cats, friends and hamsters. It’s social realism for the Biker Grove generation, with Wilson as a kind of Elizabeth Gaskell-for-kids (a comparison she appreciates – ‘I love Elizabeth Gaskell!’). She tells me she has always been interested in everyday difficulties – ‘even as a child I would purloin my mum’s magazines to turn to the Problem Page’ – and grew tired of the ‘slightly bland’ kids’ books of her childhood in the 50s and early 60s. ‘They presented a safe, middle class life that wasn’t quite what I, certainly, had experienced. I was sure a lot of children would want a book in which mums and dads sometimes quarrelled, or there were money problems.’
With her last book easily topping best-seller lists, she was evidently right about the children. It’s adults that have proved a trickier audience – the parents and teachers who, whether through honest concern or literary snobbery, have persistently judged her works ‘too grown-up’ and upsetting for their target market. Wilson’s response to her critics is diplomatic – she’ll listen if they’ve actually read her novels, but not if they’re just reacting to her reputation as ‘that dreadful Jacqueline Wilson with her books about drugs and sex’.
‘I will say my books can make children cry. But when I reply to the children who’ve written telling me, “Such-and-such made us howl” with, “I’m so sorry”, they reply “Oh, but we liked it!”’
She laughs. ‘Hopefully I’m not traumatising children!’
A Jacqueline Wilson book rarely simply makes the reader cry, however. Challenging themes are treated with childlike good-humour and optimism, with laughter as well as tears. She’s also created some of the most intelligent and interesting female characters in contemporary children’s literature, from bookworm Garnett in Double Act to Tracy Beaker kicking butt. The best girl characters in kids’ fiction are always the least ‘feminine’ and domesticated – Jo in Little Women; George in Famous Five – but Wilson’s are always totally varied and individual, whether they’re naughty or ambitious, shy, clever or funny. Would she call herself a feminist?
‘I think I am a feminist, and I was concerned to find many young readers today who aren’t. At the end of the third Hetty Feather book, for example, she goes off to become a circus ringmaster, which I thought for a restless, ambitious girl like Hetty was a lovely, swashbuckling thing to do. But many readers wrote in upset, saying they’d simply wanted her to settle down and marry the sweet-but-slightly-ordinary boy Jem who’d been brought up with her.
‘It’s touching that girls are such romantic souls, but the idea of Hetty having a career and exciting life didn’t seem to interest them. But I’m working on this.’
Writing books that touch on such sensitive subjects, it’s inevitable Wilson receives thousands of letters from children who’ve found comfort in her characters. She tells me that, though it can be overwhelming, it’s a ‘privilege’ to hear from so many of her readers and be frequently recognised by her legions of fans.
‘To hear giggles when you walk down the street – ‘It’s her!’ ‘No it isn’t!’ – and then the tentative tap at my arm and ‘Are you Jacqueline Wilson?’. It’s what every sixty-year old woman would want –
‘It’s lovely!’
