Drama Queen

The most borrowed author in British libraries is not J. K. Rowling or John Grisham or even the late Catherine Cookson, who was bumped from a 17-year reign at the top by the current champion, Jacqueline Wilson. The 60-year-old Wilson enjoys rock-star status in England, where her signings can last up to eight hours, and her pixieish face, gothic-inspired black dresses, and huge silver rings (she shops for jewelry at The Great Frog in London, where Keith Richards is also a customer) are instantly recognizable.

Wilson, who has published 86 books for children and young adults, is a literary sensation everywhere, it seems, except in the United States, where her realistic fiction sells modestly. With more than 20 million copies sold in the U.K. alone, Wilson’s novels have been translated into 30 languages and made into hit plays and TV programs. Her breakthrough book, The Story of Tracy Beaker (Doubleday, 1991), about an abandoned girl looking for a home, inspired a wildly popular BBC series that’s now in its fifth season. Wilson’s fans—mostly seven- to 14-year-old girls—love her gripping plots about dysfunctional families, homelessness, and domestic violence, to name a few dicey topics. Despite those dark themes, Wilson’s touching, first-person narratives always include humor and hope—and at least one helpful adult.

Though major literary awards like the Whitbread and Carnegie have eluded her, Double Act (1995) won the Smarties Prize in 1995 and The Illustrated Mum (1999, both Doubleday), in which two sisters cope with an alcoholic, bipolar, tattooed mother, was proclaimed the 2000 Children’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. Prince Charles presented Wilson in 2002 with an OBE—Order of the British Empire—to honor her services to literacy in schools and in May 2005 she was named Britain’s fourth Children’s Laureate. Although more popular with readers than her three Laureate predecessors, Wilson is less respected by critics, perhaps because of her prolific output and simple writing style. Feminists say that books about girls and domestic issues are the easiest to dismiss.

We spoke to Wilson at her new (to her) Victorian house in Kingston upon Thames, a London suburb. Though her sitting room was lined with books and paintings, most of her 15,000 books were still in boxes.

The new Children’s Laureate—congratulations! How did you feel when you heard the news?

It’s a lovely compliment. There have been three absolutely fantastic Laureates in the past—Quentin Blake, Anne Fine, and Michael Morpurgo. It’s also a bit of a challenge because you want to do good work, you want to do innovative things, but for me, in particular, every hour of my day is filled—so it was sort of 90 percent delight and joy and 10 percent sheer panic.

As Children’s Laureate, what are your duties?

You are there simply to promote the whole cause of children’s literature. But what it boils down to is that you are expected to do various events—some for children, the sort of thing that I do all the time, anyway; some for the great and the good in the publishing, bookselling, and library world, where you put forth your aims; and you take part in conferences, you act as a spokesperson if any particular topic comes up, and you’re free to go on television or on the radio and do lots of interviews. Generally, you choose some particular cause that you’re interested in, and I am very keen on reading aloud—the simple act of reading the most basic board book to a six-month baby and then progressing from there. I think that’s just the one way to get children hooked on books for life.

Where did you grow up? What kind of a child were you?

I was born in Bath, but my family moved to Kingston before I was two. I was a very bookish only child, relatively sociable, and I had friends, but I was happy to play by myself, too. I was always making up stories, writing stuff or drawing pictures about imaginary worlds. I haunted the library, and I loved playing with dolls.

What was your family like?

It was slightly dysfunctional: my parents had married very quickly at the tail end of the [Second World] war when they didn’t really know each other. They soon discovered that they had nothing in common apart from the fact that they were both very obstinate. They quarreled most of the time they were together, so it was a tense household. I was never ill-treated, but it wasn’t the most peaceful of upbringings. My father was a civil servant; my mum did a series of jobs but ended up as an antique dealer.

Did you grow up in a Victorian house?

We lived in rented rooms, in furnished flats, and with my grandmother. Then, when I was six, we were allocated a Council flat, where I lived until I left home. There’s a stigma in England if you live in a Council flat. My mother always stresses, rather hilariously, that it was a better class of Council flat, meant for young professionals. I would have preferred a home with a garden as we weren’t allowed pets and you had to be very quiet or you’d upset the people underneath.

When did you start writing?

I wrote throughout my childhood, with no thought of getting published—family stories, ongoing sagas, all sorts of different things—especially fictional diaries. I’d make up a character who would keep a diary. At my primary school, they did like my stories and some of my teachers read them out loud or got me to read them. But in secondary school they preferred more formal writing; my teacher was forever crossing things out and saying “too colloquial” and “too personal.”

When I was going on 17, having left school and entered a secretarial course, I was looking for a job in the newspaper and I saw an advert for teenage writers. It was from a company in Scotland, starting up a new magazine. I wrote an article about being a wallflower at my first dance, and, astonishingly, they decided to pay me for it. I wrote more articles and within a couple of months they’d actually offered me a proper job up in Dundee, on the magazine, and so I went for it! I worked in Dundee for a couple of years and then was daft enough to become a sort of child bride, married at 19. We came back down south, where I wrote magazine stories just to pay bills, but I was also writing [adult crime] novels and eventually one got published when I was 24.

When did you decide to write for children?

One day in the 1970s, I was choosing books for my own daughter at the Kingston children’s library and I found a series edited by Leila Berg, who did pioneering work with books for younger children. She thought that for a child in a bleak housing estate, the world pictured in reading books, where everybody lived in pretty houses with manicured lawns, would be hard for those kids to relate to, so she started a series of books called Nippers.

I thought maybe I could write something like that without having any idea that actually the different authors are approached by the editor and invited, and that you don’t just send things on spec. I counted up the number of words on each page, saw that there were 32 pages, and so had a go, and sent Richard’s Birthday off to this Leila Berg, and, wonderfully for me, she bought it.

Soon I got interested in the way American teenage novels were developing. There were lots in the ’70s told as first-person narratives and I liked this colloquial, open style. So I wrote a book called Nobody’s Perfect about a teenager who wanted to be a writer. She didn’t know who her real father was and she wanted to trace him. I sent it around to six different publishers, including the ones who had published my crime novels, and I got various rejection letters, but luckily for me, Oxford University Press decided—after nine agonizing months!—to publish it.

Talk a bit about the success of Tracy Beaker.

I wanted to write a book about a child being fostered, and so I wrote The Story of Tracy Beaker. I wanted lots of illustrations, because I thought they would break up the text, and maybe attract readers who would be put off reading dense wording. I also thought it would be very much part of the book to have Tracy doing all her little drawings. Also, my childhood books, my Noel Streatfeilds and Eve Garnetts, had beautiful black-and-white illustrations, so I couldn’t see why you couldn’t do this and [publisher] Transworld was very sweet and said yes, you can have [illustrator] Nick Sharratt, and there we go! That’s what happened.

The book’s done very well. Now there is a fortnightly magazine that you subscribe to, called Totally Tracy Beaker and that’s been very successful and there’s going to be a lot of merchandising. So this is lovely but it’s also more work because I’m a control freak and I want to make sure everything looks attractive and that children are going to be getting value for their money.

What is your favorite of your books?

Possibly The Illustrated Mum, because I tried extra hard with that book. I knew I was doing something quite difficult, writing about a much-loved mother who lets her children down and suffers from mental illness and behaves very irresponsibly. I knew it was going to be a book without many laughs because there’s just no way you could have a sense of humor about such a searing and worrying subject. But I wanted to write it, and I wanted to write it truthfully.

Some of your adult characters are pretty scary!

Parents and teachers can’t always be kind and concerned and perfect. But I don’t believe that this is a totally bleak world. There are very kind and concerned people in it, and I want there always to be a message to children that even if your mum lets you down, there will be somebody else that will look after you or care for you.

Do children ask why you always wear black?

They do, and I say it’s because I was so not allowed to wear black in my teens. The whole beatnik movement had come in, and I ached to look like [French singer] Juliet Greco, with long hair and black jumpers and black trousers and black boots. My mother wanted me to have short, permed hair and wear pastel clothes and try to look ladylike. In my twenties, I did wear other colors, but black was beckoning to me. I find I’ve got this taste for silver jewelry. If you wear very bright, patterned clothes, you start to look like a Christmas tree, but plain black clothes act as a foil for the jewelry.

What do you hope to accomplish in the future?

[I’d like to] go on getting reasonably good ideas. After 86 books I’d like to make it to 100. But I can’t help observing that with somebody like dear Noel Streatfeild, who was quite prolific, her later books don’t seem to have the freshness and the bite that the earlier ones do. If I come to this, then I’ll know it’s time to hang up the pen and just read rather than write.

And I’d like to, at the end of my two-year Laureate term, feel that I’ve actually achieved something and introduced a lot more children to the joy of reading, which I think would be the most worthwhile thing ever.