Dame Jacqueline Wilson might have written over 100 novels in her time, but she faced a peculiar amount of pressure with her new book.
That’s probably because of the weight of expectations around it, as Wilson was planning on continuing her beloved Girls series – revisiting the lives of Ellie, Magda and Nadine, who are now aged 40.
“I got excited and a little bit worried,” Wilson, 78, says of writing an adult sequel to the four-part Girls series, which began with with 1997’s Girls In Love, followed by 1998’s Girls Under Pressure, 1999’s Girls Out Late and 2002’s Girls in Tears.
“I don’t know, I think it’s a silly writer thing. You have to have immense confidence to start a book and feel that people would want to read it, and yet you also suffer agonies, thinking: Is it alright? I veer from one to the other – but then I always have done.”
This pressure was compounded by the fact that Wilson knows that “quite a lot of books” in the Girls series were sold when they came out. “I used to get a lot of letters, then they became emails, from girls – mostly girls, occasionally boys – who’d read my books,” she says – and she just hopes that the new book, Think Again, is not a “crashing disappointment” to those long-time fans.
So why did Wilson want to pick up narrator Ellie’s story when she was hitting 40? For the Sussex-based writer, this is a time of life when you can often find yourself at a crossroads.
“Forty is an interesting age, because if you want children and you don’t [have them], you might think you want to get a move on. If you’ve got a partner and they seem like a five-and-a-half out of 10, you think: Do I want to move on elsewhere? If you’re in a profession that you’ve worked really hard for, but you’ve got stuck at a certain level, you think: Is this what I want to do for the next 20 years of my life?
“There’s so many different things you can do, and thank goodness it’s not a sign of, right, now I must stop wearing cute clothes and consider whether I can still dance. Even my mother’s generation, 40 was the start of wearing much more staid clothing and staying at home knitting. Thank God it’s not like that at all anymore.”
Understandably, writing an adult’s book – Wilson’s first since the 1970s – is a bit different to the well-trodden ground of her children’s books, where she’s known for creating much-loved characters like Tracy Beaker and Hetty Feather.
First, Wilson had to get into the right headspace. “I know various 40-year-olds that live in my village, or I meet up with through publishing or booksellers, but I really didn’t feel I could cosy up and ask really intimate questions about what they did or didn’t do,” she says with a laugh.
This is in stark comparison to when she was writing the original series about the three teenage girls. “I was doing endless schools at the time, particularly secondary schools,” Wilson remembers.
“I always asked the literacy coordinator or English teacher, ‘Do you think the girls would mind doing a little survey for me?’ The questions were like, what sort of things are you allowed to do? Do you want to have a boyfriend? What do you hate most about yourself? What are you really proud of? Those sorts of things, so I could focus on what their lives were like” – with Wilson adding she “didn’t have the bottle” to do the same to middle-aged women.
“Besides, girls are quite open about things, whereas once you’re 40, you’re good at putting on a veneer. You know the right thing to say, even if it’s not how you really think or feel. So I just had to take a punt at it.”
Plus, she had the “notoriously difficult” experience of writing sex scenes, which she “tried to do my best” at.
As a writer, she says: “Either you’ve got a sense of humour and you want to scream with laughter, or you go, eurgh! It’s hard. I tried to show that it was very enjoyable or perhaps embarrassing, but not actually describe anatomically what was happening.”
And then came the challenge of her 56-year-old academic daughter Emma, who she had with her ex-husband Millar Wilson, reading Think Again, with all these more adult scenes. “I’m her mum, and she’s sophisticated, she knows perfectly well what you write as fiction is not what’s happened to you,” Wilson notes. “But it is a bit weird – your mum writing sex scenes!”
One good thing about writing an adult’s book is the “freedom” it allowed Wilson, who lives with her long-term partner, Trish.
“There’s certainly more freedom writing an adult book than a children’s book – [although] I don’t think there’s anything in Think Again that would really disturb a precocious child, they’d probably be bored reading about adults,” she explains.
“But if Ellie or any of the girls does something stupid or worrying, you don’t have to make it very, very clear, or even cut that bit in tremendously quickly, because you might influence some child with a children’s book. If you’re an adult reading it, you know for yourself what you feel would be sensible or not sensible.”
The ending of Think Again feels somewhat open, but Wilson says she has no current plans to continue Ellie’s story further into adulthood. That’s not to say she’s slowing down any time soon, with mysterious projects and more children’s books on the horizon.
“I do still get ideas, thank goodness – they’re not quite as much as they used to be, but they’re still there,” Wilson admits.
“While I can still string two sentences together, I’m not giving up.”
Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson is published in hardback by Bantam, priced £22. Available September 12.
