Jacqueline Wilson on childhood turmoil and the dog mishap that deleted a book

Childhood fault lines, a vanished manuscript, and the grit behind a beloved voice

Jacqueline Wilson doesn’t usually trade on shock value, but two details from a candid interview stop you cold: as a child, she prayed for her parents to get divorced, and as an adult, two dogs erased her almost-finished book in seconds.

The first confession reaches back to a home life she describes as fraught. That longing for calm, even if it meant a split, sits right alongside the themes that have run through her fiction for decades—kids navigating chaos, finding steady footing when the ground moves. You can hear echoes of that in how her characters talk, worry, answer back, and cope. It’s one reason her stories didn’t just entertain; they felt like a hand held out.

The second story reads like slapstick until the punchline lands. Wilson had completed a long children’s book and was putting on the finishing touches while working on her sofa. Her pug settled in on one side, a friend’s Jack Russell on the other. A quick shuffle, a mistimed paw, and the wrong keys lit up. The file vanished. She and her partner, Trish Beswick, tried everything they could think of to rescue it. “Each time we tried to retrieve it, we were making it harder and harder,” she recalled. In the end, nothing worked.

For any writer, that’s the nightmare. Ernest Hemingway’s early manuscripts disappeared in a lost suitcase a century ago; today, it’s stray keystrokes and sync errors. Wilson didn’t linger in self-pity. She regrouped. The hard truth is there’s no shortcut back—only the hours you put in again. The relief in her voice comes from surviving the shock and remembering she still knows how to do the work.

That mix of tenderness and toughness has long been her brand. Wilson has chronicled the lives of kids who feel unseen or unheard and given them center stage. It’s why her books stuck. Her empathy isn’t detached; it’s lived-in.

Ballet Shoes, grown-up readers, and a medieval line that still steadies her

The book that made her heart thump as a child was Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. When the National Theatre asked her to write a short piece for a new staging, she went back to it and found the old spark intact. She remembered longing for lessons she never got, padding around the house in pink bedroom slippers, imagining herself as the fourth Fossil sister alongside Pauline, Petrova, and Posy. That detail matters: before she became an author, she was a reader performing a private audition for a life on the page.

Rereading Ballet Shoes didn’t just stir nostalgia. It reminded her of the oxygen great children’s books can give—permission to be ambitious, to try, to fail, to try again. You can see those strands run through Wilson’s own work: the big feelings, the unfairness, the small steady acts of bravery that add up to a future.

She’s recently returned to adult fiction, revisiting characters she last wrote about in the 1990s and following them into their forties. That shift sounds simple on paper, but it’s a test: can the voice that once spoke to nine-year-olds now meet their grown-up selves without talking down or smoothing the edges? The response from readers suggests yes. She’s meeting people in their thirties who grew up with her paperbacks, now turning up to hear what happened next—to those characters, and in a way, to themselves.

Wilson’s best piece of advice isn’t a checklist or hack. It’s a line etched into a bangle she wears, words from the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich: “All should be well and all should be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” In an anxious moment—after a lost chapter, before a difficult scene, during a sleepless night—she finds it oddly practical. The reassurance is not that nothing will go wrong. It’s that you can go on, even when it does.

What ties her stories together, old and new, is that belief. Kids in her books carry heavy loads, yet the tone never tips into despair. Adults return to those pages because they remember the feeling of being seen. And Wilson herself, shaped by a childhood that made her wish for a break in the storm, still writes toward a clearing—one line at a time, dogs politely kept off the keyboard.