—A University response to the spaces I am drawn to as a writer. —

My dad’s gift to me on my seventh birthday was four books. He had paced the children’ section of the bookstore, reading the blurb of each book before finally purchasing them an hour later. It was the perfect gift, because there was nothing I would have rather done that spend my days devouring the pages of a new novel. This critical essay will be written in an attempt to comprehend what children fiction consists of, and to challenge the difference in the ways and spaces in which I read and wrote fiction as a kid, in comparison with the current day. Fundamentally, I will reflect on the responsibilities of children’s writers, predominantly using Jacqueline Wilson as an example. Here, there are two forces that I have contended with, through the judgment of both others’ writing on my own: the concerns of worrying about the exposing child readers to difficult issues, and the concerns as to whether those issues are to be exposed through a story that is not mine (or another author’s).

My favourite book was, and still remains, a children’s fiction novel named Candyfloss (2006), by British author Jacqueline Wilson.  It details the life of a nine-year-old girl with divorced parents. The girl chooses to stay with her less-fortunate father, and they later end up homeless and living in a food van. Wilson has a reputation, I now learn, to write on controversial themes, with issues at large: mental disorders in The Illustrated Mum (1999), sexuality in Kiss (2007), and homelessness, bullying, abuse or all of the above in many of her hundred novels. While this may, at first thought, be too weighty for a children’s book, Wilson’s tone, quirky description and peculiar characterisation make it easily comprehensive. Beyond that, her books display a vital sense of realism and raw authenticity. At seven-years-old, I was heavily invested in the pages that entailed the little girl in The Illustrated Mum (1999) finding her mentally-ill mum covered in white paint. I found myself encapsulated by her ability to detail such emotionally heavy stories and reread them so often I found myself in their shoes, the wild imagination only halting when I was told to stop reading at the dinner table.

Without even realising it, these mature and somewhat grave spaces were the ones I inhabited in most as a kid- and the ones that follow children as they progress into adolescence and adulthood. Hence, fictional novels like Stockett’s (2009) The Help, and films like Joon-Ho’s Parasite (2019), which evoke themes related to racial and social-class respectively, captivate and educate adult audiences- myself amongst them. As such, fiction brings light to critical issues in a way that engages with entertainment, plot and nuanced characterisation. There are several opportunities and obstacles that play into how these issues can be presented to children.

Like many writers of contemporary realism, Wilson has been criticised by individuals who prefer that all children’s books are sheltering of children’s innocence (Mangan, 2015).  Some parents have banned her books; one mother expressed horror when her child voiced her longing to live in a care council centre like one of Wilson’s characters (Mangan, 2015). Yet as a child, these storylines had traced the intricacies of places unknown to me. I sympathised immensely with Wilson’s character Lola-Rose- who at ten-years-old is abused by her father and left to care for her brother while her mother is hospitalized (Wilson, 2003). My naivety meant that concurrently, I yearned to try a ‘chip butty’, the meal that connects Floss and her father in Candyfloss (Wilson, 2006) when they are on the brink of homelessness. I am saddened to hear that parents no longer approve of Wilson’s books, whose storylines majorly transcended the level of real-life and applicable education I gained from reading books with conspicuous morals like The Giving Tree (Silverstein, 1964) or Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (Dahl, 1964).

Wilson’s recent comments about not yearning to write a novel about a transgender child has further blown-up as ‘transphobic’ by online activists (Petter, 2019). The comments stem from an incident of which a young adult novelist fictionalises the struggles of a transgender teen which prompted people to say “it wasn’t his story to write” (Petter, 2019). Wilson is seventy-three now, and still writes novels from a child’s perspective (Ferguson, 2019). She focuses on children from the Victorian Times (Ferguson, 2019) because doesn’t want to be criticised by modern ‘protective, middle-class parents’ (Petter, 2019). Yet I favoured her previous work, where her inclusion deemed effortless; bold in its lack fear of parents who thought her novels were too heavy for their children, and publishers who censored her in apprehension of negative controversy.

I, too, have recently expressed feeling shameful for the way my writing reads; many-a-time I have questioned my ability to write about nuanced topics due to issues surrounding censorship. Such issues involve mental health, grief, identity- the list is ongoing- that remain ever prevalent in fiction and non-fiction today. Where I used comfortably write within the spaces I had never experienced, my creativity now seems to shrink year by year. In my early teenage years, my love for words and storytelling withstood still, but then the insecurity crept in, and I found myself starting to despise the sentiment I had when I was writing. I now write carefully, fearing that I might say the wrong thing.

Today, my favourite books still remain the fiction books I read in my childhood- the ones that not only brought me outside my own little world but that have also taught me empathy through a lens of a reality I wouldn’t otherwise have known.

At ten-years-old I typed a story on my dad’s computer. It was about a girl who was so physically and mentally abused by her mother that she ran away from home. At thirteen, I wrote over seventy pages about a girl with anorexia nervosa. At seventeen, I was a runner-up in a short story competition, where I had, again, written about abuse. With hindsight, it is clear what novels had inspired me- Wilson’s Lola-Rose (2003), and Fathallah’s Monkey Taming (2006), which details a teenage girl’s battle with anorexia and of which I had read at ten-years-old. As a child I had a natural curiosity which spurred me to educate myself on serious world issues.

Would I risk writing these stories now, knowing what I know about the complexities of censorship?