Tracey Beaker author Dame Jacqueline Wilson has swapped writing award winning children’s books for an adults only novel with steamy sex scenes.
The former children’s laureate, 79, who has penned Picture Imperfect, a follow-up to her 1999 children’s book The Illustrated Mum, has admitted she’s worried how her nearest and dearest will react to the saucy storyline.
‘I have to forget that everybody who is a friend of mine or family might be going to read it, because otherwise you get tremendously hot under the collar and embarrassed about it’.
The book catches up with now adult Dolphin, a tattoo artist who is struggling to look after her bi-polar stricken mother Marigold.
Speaking about the change of pace, she said: ‘I thought about this carefully because, well, if Beatrix Potter had suddenly started writing some steamy adult novel, because you get identified with your childhood characters, it would seem a little strange’.
‘But I thought: “If I’m writing for adults, generally people do have sex lives, or want to have sex lives, or are quite happy not to have sex lives, but aware they are not having them”. So, I thought: “This is part of life”‘.
Tracey Beaker author Dame Jacqueline Wilson, 79, has swapped writing award winning children’s books for an adults only novel with steamy sex scenes
The former children’s laureate but has admitted she is worried how her nearest and dearest will react to the saucy storyline (Dani Harmer pictured as Tracey Beaker in BBC adaptation)
Jaqueline told Sussex Life: ‘In my children’s books there’s an awful lot about food, the picnic meals, the treats, and somebody said that in children’s books the place of sex is taken by food. So I’ve lots of food in the children’s books and a little bit of sex in the adult books.’
The author has published more than 100 books since her first in 1969 and last year fans went wild when she revealed she was releasing a new instalment of her Girls in Love series.
Readers of a certain age group grew up on tales written by the Bath-born and London-raised writer, who tackles social issues in her novels, which often feature children as the protagonists .
From a domestic abuse survivor in Lola Rose to a girl whose family had been made homeless in The Bed and Breakfast Star, and the infamous character of Tracey Beaker who lived in a care home (‘The Dumping Ground’) which was turned into a successful CBBC series starring Dani Harmer, her books portrayed young people who were struggling in some aspects of life.
She has previously revealed she wanted to write ‘realistic’ books, that she didn’t feel had been available when she was a child and an avid reader.
‘As a child, I loved reading, but I was always irritated that children always had parents who didn’t row and didn’t divorce,’ the author told iNews.
Jacqueline herself was brought up on a council estate in Kingston-upon-Thames after being born in Bath and was an only child.
In 2016, she opened up about how her parents’ rocky relationship had affected her outlook on life when she was a child – and shaped how she wanted to write in later life.
‘I have to forget that everybody who is a friend of mine or family might be going to read it, because otherwise you get tremendously hot under the collar and embarrassed about it’
Speaking about the change of pace: ‘I thought about this carefully because, well, if Beatrix Potter had suddenly started writing some steamy adult novel, it would seem a little strange’.
Picture Imperfect is a follow-up to her 1999 children’s book The Illustrated Mum
Speaking to the Guardian she revealed her father Harry was a depressive from whom her mother Biddy wanted a divorce – however in those days, divorce was not an option.
The author, who now lives with her partner Trish Beswick after divorcing her husband, with whom she shares a daughter, in 2004, recalled how her mother ‘undermined’ her father, who would then ‘take his temper out on her’.
She added: ‘They would shove each other, certainly, and she would have slapped at him’ although she did not recall Harry ever lashing out at Biddy.
The author recalled being smacked by her mother if she misbehaved and living in fear of her father’s temper.
‘You never knew quite what you would say or do that would set my dad off. I was frequently frightened of him right up until the day he died,’ Wilson recalled.
Writing for the Telegraph, she recalled a diary entry she made when she was 14 years old in which she asked, ‘Why are Enid Blyton’s children always so well-to-do?’ and, ‘why do their parents never quarrel or have money worries?’
Despite a turbulent family life, Wilson felt it was all ‘normal’ as a child because she didn’t know anything different.
