Children's Author Jacqueline Wilson Officially Comes Out at 74

Children’s author Jacqueline Wilson has come out after living with her partner for 18 years.

Wilson has written scores of best-selling books for kids over her long career, including the Tracy Beaker and Hetty Feather series. But it’s the upcoming book #111, Love Frankie, that will feature a girl falling for another girl in her class.

That’s what prompted Wilson, who is 74, to finally speak out after all these years, even though the fact that she’s been living with her partner Trish after divorcing her ex-husband has never been secret.

“I’ve never really been in any kind of closet,” Wilson told The Guardian. “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.”

And the reason Wilson has waited until now to write a book so prominently featuring a queer main character is actually kind of great.

According to The Guardian, Wilson says all of her previous books were focused around kids with problems, and the stories of how they coped with them. And this author didn’t see “any problem whatsoever with being gay.”

And Love Frankie doesn’t treat being gay as a problem that needs some kind of solving, either. Wilson describes it as “a truthful, honest book about a girl falling in love with another girl,” “aimed at all teenagers who have ever worried because they haven’t fallen in love, or they have fallen in love.”