“I can’t think of a book where there’s a woman born into a working-class background, who in her 70s is living a very comfortable, upper-middle-class sort of life; a woman who married at 19, had a baby at 21, was a policeman’s wife for years, but whose marriage broke up in late middle age and who became very well known for a time. She then met a woman and became very happy with her. There isn’t one!” Former children’s laureate Jacqueline Wilson is rattling through the outline of her own autobiography – which she has no plans to write, although she did publish a “simplified” memoir for children, Jacky Daydream, in 2007. While her story – her rise from “perfectly ordinary” beginnings to become one of the most successful British children’s authors – is well known, the last chapter may come as surprise to her legion of fans. Despite plans to visit her at home in Sussex, we are talking on the phone (Wilson is 74 and has had serious health problems) before the launch of her latest novel, Love Frankie, the release of a starry film of her 2012 novel Four Children and It, and cinema screenings of the hit stage production of her book Hetty Feather – “ a flurry of exciting things”. With its sprinkling of stars and hearts, Love Frankie (her 111th book, if anyone is still counting), looks like any other teen romance, but the rainbow on the inside cover is a clue that this isn’t the usual boy-meets-girl story. The middle one of three sisters, bookish tomboy Frankie is struggling to deal with her mum’s MS diagnosis, their dad leaving them for “horrible Helen”, and the mean girls at school: so far, so Jacqueline Wilson. Then she falls for Sally, the prettiest, coolest girl in class. (And she just happens to be writing a dystopian story “about a devastating plague affecting the whole Earth”.) While Wilson “generally bristles” at any suggestion that her novels are “full of issues”, by her own admission, Love Frankie is “jam-packed” with them: a sick mum, separation, stepfamilies, sibling rivalry, bullying, falling in love … as Wilson says, “it goes on and on”. And then there’s “the gay issue”, which she has only glancingly approached before. Her books have proved surprisingly controversial over the years, but Love Frankie, into which she has “put her heart and soul”, is perhaps her bravest, at least in a personal sense. “Well, I think so,” she agrees, “because I knew perfectly well that it would shine a little light on my own private life.” For 18 years, Wilson has been living “very happily” with her partner, Trish, a former bookseller, who she met at a party after the breakdown of her marriage in her early 50s. But she doesn’t see this as her “coming-out novel”. “I’ve never really been in any kind of closet,” she says laughing. “It would be such old news for anybody that has ever known anything much about me. Even the vaguest acquaintance knows perfectly well that we are a couple.” With her silver pixie crop, chunky silver rings (she used to buy one for every novel) and twinkly manner polished by years of public appearances, Wilson is the fairy goth-mother of children’s fiction credited with daring to introduce such non-cheery subjects as depression and divorce into her children’s bedrooms. But with her Blytonesque enthusiasm and fondness for pronouncing everything “delightful”, Wilson seems the least devilish person you could meet. And despite her risky reputation, she is always at pains to stress that there are no sex or drugs in her fiction – “not at all!” – with Love Frankie no exception (there is a punch bowl and there are a couple of kisses). For years, she received letters and emails from readers asking: “Why on earth do you never write a book about being gay?” She would reply that because she usually wrote about children with problems, and didn’t see “any problem whatsoever with being gay”, it didn’t leave her with much of a plot – an answer that wouldn’t satisfy most teenagers struggling with their sexuality. As she admits, “adolescence is such a questioning time”, when even wearing the wrong pair of jeans can make you feel like an outcast. So she set out to write “a truthful, honest book about a girl falling in love with another girl. It’s certainly not aimed at young gay teenagers, it’s aimed at ALL teenagers who have ever worried because they haven’t fallen in love, or they have fallen in love.” In a culture that, as she observes, now almost demands that novelists have firsthand experience of what they write about, she hasn’t felt any obligation to speak out as some sort of mentor. “I don’t think that girls would ever have wanted a grey-haired, wrinkly writer as a role model if they were wanting to feel good about maybe being gay,” she laughs. “I’m sure they could find much more glamorous examples.” This is not the first time she has touched on the subject: her 2007 novel Kiss is a mirror-image of Love Frankie, in which Sylvie can’t understand why Carl, her best friend and the boy next door, isn’t interested in her, just as boy-next-door Sammy longs to be more than friends with Frankie. (Attentive older readers might also have wondered about Cam, Tracy Beaker’s foster mother in the recent follow-up novel My Mum Tracy Beaker, who finds happiness with Tracy’s teacher Mary, “And why not!” Wilson said at the time.) She agrees with the criticisms that children’s books still have a long way to go in reflecting diversity in general. She has always imagined her best-loved character Tracy Beaker “to be of dual heritage, because I’d never ever mentioned her dad, who is long off the scene”, although for many a millennial she will always be remembered as she was portrayed in the hugely popular 2002 CBBC TV series by Dani Harmer. Despite this, she feels publishing has a lot to learn from the increasingly colour-blind casting of television shows, including the recent adaptation of Katy, Wilson’s retelling of Susan Coolidge’s classic What Katy Did, which changed how she thought of her own characters. For the most part, Wilson has “shied away” from writing about being a teenager since her 1997-2002 quartet Girls in Love because adolescence has become an alien universe of selfies, clicks and likes. She doesn’t even have a smartphone and now Frankie’s older sister Zara dreams of being a YouTube sensation. Yet Wilson pulls it off, getting the details spot on, from texting (only your mum signs off “Love Mum”) to clothes (“no one wears a dress!”), insights she credits to “the little refresher course” in teenage habits she gets with every school visit. Despite these reservations, she decided that falling in love, was “such an overwhelming” and universal feeling that even social media didn’t matter too much. “I’m a sort of sweet old-fashioned soul,” she confesses. “I’m not into ‘Who do you fancy?’ or ‘Are you going to have a quick bunk-up?’ For me it is “Who do you fall in love with?” Growing up, the author, like many of her characters, was always “a bit of an odd one out”. She didn’t have a crush on anyone of either sex: “But you just never know what is lurking inside you.” As a novelist friend put it: “‘I don’t think you are a lesbian, I think you are a Trishian.’ I think that really sums me up.” Trish has been a lifesaver, almost literally, attempting to donate her kidney when Wilson needed a transplant. But it didn’t work out. “It’s funny we are compatible in every way apart from our blood type.” Then, in what sounds like an adult version of a Wilson plot-line, they took part in an anonymous swapping scheme with another couple: her kidney type was the same as the donor’s and Trish’s was the same as their partner. They had to wait about a year before they got a good match. “It was so special to us and so private,” she says. Wilson also suffered heart failure in 2008, and so while she can’t manage marathon signing queues these days (one once lasted seven hours), she’s almost as busy as ever. The only person who was “appalled” at her relationship with Trish was her mother. “It wasn’t too devastating for me because my mum cordially hated my ex-husband, she didn’t really approve of any of my friends,” Wilson laughs. She describes her mum as “an interesting woman”, “a forceful mother who thought she always knew best”, but not a very maternal one. Yet one of the joys of a Wilson novel is the affection with which she captures the intimacy and intensity between mums and daughters. She adores her only daughter Emma, now an academic at Cambridge, who made her swear, when she was about nine, never to put her in any of her novels, a promise she has done her best to keep. Fathers don’t get quite such a good write up and while there are a few good ones in Wilson’s fiction they are undoubtedly outnumbered. “I’ve tried hard,” she says laughing: “I don’t know … my experience of my own dad and my own ex-husband possibly has some effect. I will remedy this. It is very unfair. I have tried harder, but I just can’t quite get there yet.” Her endings are rarely straightforwardly happy, readers have complained when the parents don’t get back together, and friendship is often rated more highly than romantic love. “I can be a bit mean,” she agrees. “I suppose I’m trying to show that there are different ways of being a happy family.” Although her own badly matched parents stayed together (they wouldn’t have done today, she says) hers was not a happy childhood, something she now sees as an advantage for an aspiring writer. She left home at 17 and the rest has become part of the Jacqueline Wilson legend: the job on Jackie Magazine (which may, or may not, have been named after her: “It’s a nice story”); the 40 books published in relative anonymity before bolshy Tracy Beaker changed her life. And now her own “alternative” happy ending. Today she and Trish are holed up in their house in Sussex. Wilson, who had spent most of her life in Kingston upon Thames, was anxious about moving to the country, but when they discovered the house, with its expansive views and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, it seemed as if it “would be especially for us. And so far it has jolly well proved that. It is a delight.” It is also home to her collections. She has a huge library and upstairs “a most-eccentric room” devoted to her collection of toys, including a rocking horse, and dolls. There’s also a life-sized mannequin that she dresses up in different outfits. “I hasten to add that I don’t actually play with them,” she laughs. “I’m not completely dotty!” She was in London last month for a screening of Four Kids and It (released on Sky this weekend), rather surprisingly her first film. Always a childhood favourite, E Nesbit became an influence for the way in which her books were the first “to change the more moral tone of the 19th century” (she also bought silver jewellery each time she completed a novel). Updated “with my sort of children”, Nesbit’s 1902 fantasy Five Children and It is given the full Wilson treatment when a seemingly disastrous first holiday – for a “jigsaw family” of two divorced parents and their kids – is rescued by the appearance of a magical, grouchy Psammead (voiced by Michael Caine, “which absolutely delights me”) on a Cornish beach, who grants them wishes, from learning to fly to becoming a pop sensation (Cheryl Cole makes an appearance). Baddy Tristan is played “with immense style” by Russell Brand. And keep your eyes peeled for a silver-haired woman in a book-signing queue as the opening credits roll. A film version of the hit West End production Hetty Feather (adapted by Emma Reeves, who won awards for the Tracy Beaker TV series), her hugely popular Victorian foundling, was also due to be screened in cinemas later this month. To keep to her regime of two books a year, she doesn’t allow herself to get up before she’s written at least 500 words. She has almost finished her next novel, “a nice meaty historical book”, set during the Great Exhibition with “nothing controversial” about it, or at least she doesn’t think so. And despite the scariness of the outside world, she is “perfectly happily settled in my ways and in old age”, she says. “Maybe I’ve just been greedy. I’ve had one kind of life, then I’ve had another kind of life. This is just the way I am.”