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Jacqueline Wilson |
Keep a secret: the diary hasn’t had its day
Children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, a speaker at Jewish Book Week, believes diaries are valuable literature, writes Dan Carrier
AUTHOR Jacqueline Wilson is about to do something that would fill lesser mortals with dread. She is about to take the stage this weekend at a book festival to read excepts from her own, secret teenage diaries.
The children’s writer, whose books made her the children’s laureate, and won her an OBE, is speaking at the Jewish Book Week and her topic is teenage diary keeping. So what better way to start than by flicking through the pages of her own, adolescent ramblings?
“I can be selective,” she admits. “It will save some blushes.”
Her first diary starts when she was 14, and she has kept one intermittently from then on.
“I still have all my own teenage diaries,” she says.
“I kept a diary on and off through my teenage years. I kept one when I was 14, 15 and then when I was 17 and had left home. It has been really useful for me. They have proved to be an invaluable help to remember what my life was like in the 1960s. They work as a memory tool.”
However, she no longer religiously fills a journal each day: “I still try to keep one, but I am very busy with my writing. I started one at the beginning of the year but had stopped by the end of January.”
Her own books are full of teens and pre-teens who have to face an imperfect world, governed by imperfect adults. Her book Tracy Beaker has become a successful TV series and she has sold millions of books. One of her novels, Secrets, tells the story of two teenage girls with an unlikely friendship cemented through diary writing.
And she believes that diary-keeping is something that can help ease people through the emotional whirlpools of adolescence – a non-judgmental place to air your thoughts and feelings.
She says: “I will be interested to see how many people in the audience, how many teenage girls, keep a diary. And it can help formulate your thoughts. When children ask me for writing tips, I always say, ‘keep a diary. It is a good way of getting yourself to write each day and get the discipline you need to improve’.
“When it’s a diary, you feel compelled to write each day.
“I think it may be a particularly female thing: teenage boys are much better at keeping lists. They write down their favourite music, the scores from their football teams. They seem to have this list mentality: teenage girls like to write about other things, such as whether the boy on the bus has noticed them.”
And diaries have always been an inspiration for Jacqueline. She says: “Lots of my books feature them, and some have been written in diary form. My fictional characters write diaries.”
She will also discuss Anne Frank, the teenage diarist who hid in Holland from the Nazis during the war.
Jacqueline says: “What is particularly touching is she is just like any other teenage girl at the beginning of the diary, with details such as the types of things she gets for her birthday and her boyfriends. And then, when she goes into the secret annexe, she has new things to deal with, and is angry.
“It gets hard to read for the last few months. If only they could have lasted for a few more months, she would have developed into a great writer and had a long career.”
The talk will also touch on the history of the diary. Jacqueline reveals that it was primarily a Victorian invention. She said: “Queen Victorian kept a journal.
“The Bronte sisters did not, but every birthday they would write a letter addressed to themselves in the future, to discuss what they felt like, what mattered to them, on that day.”
Other highlights include Hampstead-based actor Janet Suzman. The Royal Shakespeare Company regular is reading from the biography of author Bernard Malamud, the Brooklyn Jew from a first generation immigrant background who became one of the most celebrated voices of New York in the 20th century – but whose work has been neglected since his death in 1986.
Philip Davis has written the first biography of Malamud – a publication that has coincided with a revival of his works. Davis will tell the story of his life and times, and his inspiration for his writing.
www.jewishbookweek.com/2008/ |
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