A chat with Tracy Beaker creator Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson Love Frankie, Doubleday, £12.99

Former Children’s Laureate Dame Jacqueline Wilson has written 111 books, but Love Frankie is her first to focus on a same-sex love story.

The Tracey Beaker creator – who in a past incarnation worked for DC Thomson’s teen magazine Jackie – doesn’t think that should come as a surprise.

Never been one to shy away from the complexities of real life, she has been happily living in a same-sex relationship with her partner Trish for 18 years.

The 74-year-old, who officially “came out” in April, says: “Everybody who even vaguely knew me knew all about it, so it wasn’t like a grand ‘coming out’. To my way of thinking, I’ve never been in.”

Love Frankie is a story about the eponymous 14-year-old tomboy teenager who falls in love with Sally, the prettiest girl in the class who happens to be the school bully. The two strike up an unlikely friendship.

“I’d written about teenagers falling in love with boys and I thought, why don’t I write about a same-sex ‘falling in love’ story? It was hard to think of many recent books that deal with two girls falling in love.

“Whether you’re gay or straight or not decided, falling in love is such an extraordinary thing, it blows you away. I thought any young person might be interested in the whole phenomenon.”

Wilson was married for 38 years before separating from her husband, printer Millar Wilson. She says she’s not sure if she was gay when she married him at 19 – they eventually divorced in 2004, and have a daughter, Emma.

“I know it sounds bizarre, but I truly feel that I fall in love with the person, not their gender. I had an OK marriage. We were totally different and I did my best to make a go of it,” she reflects. “My mother disapproved, but she was just being awkward because she had gay friends herself and was very fond of other gay people.”

She says her relationship with her late father – who she describes as “a strange man” who had “nothing in common” with her difficult mother, wasn’t great either. “They met in wartime, when couples got together quite quickly as they didn’t know what was going to happen the next month, the next year. It was doomed to failure from the start.”

Wilson has been shielding at her home in the countryside of Sussex during lockdown, partly because of her age and partly because she had a kidney transplant five years ago, so her immune system is weakened. But it hasn’t hindered her output as a writer.

Over the years, she has tackled divorce, bullying, broken families and other adult issues in her children’s books and has faced criticism from parents who prefer fairytales.

Part of her aim is to let children who may be experiencing difficult issues know that they are not alone. The other is to give them an entertaining read. She says her books generally have “light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Luckily, I’ve rarely had a negative response. If you want an absolutely fairytale world, then don’t go to my books.”

She’s already written her next book, The Runaway Girls, and is excited about the fact that Dani Harmer will be returning next year as Tracy Beaker, now a single mum with a 12-year-old daughter, in a new CBBC series, My Mum Tracy Beaker. “I’ve had a sneak peek at the girl who might play Tracy’s daughter. I’m absolutely thrilled with it.”