My Secret Diary--Dating, Dancing, Dreams and Dilemmas.

Jay, Mary

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

My Secret Diary--Dating, Dancing, Dreams and Dilemmas

Jacqueline Wilson

Corgi Books 2010

ISBN 978 05525 61563

Paperback 5.99 [pounds sterling]

The subtitle to this book is 'Dating, Dancing, Dreams and Dilemmas' and coupled with the vibrant shiny cover, this should attract any ardent reader of Wilson's stories. Pitched at the upper end of her young audience, this autobiography provides an insight into Wilson's teen years and her early writing career but may well be 'stolen' by adults for an amusingly evocative trip back in time for anyone who was a child of the 60s. However, for Jacqueline Wilson's contemporary audience, this could well read like a lively depiction of social history.

Wilson recounts the details of her teenage years in lively, unadorned prose interspersed with references to the books she enjoyed reading and the writers who fired her imagination. She alternates the original diary entries with her retrospective commentary as an adult. Her writing is acutely audience-orientated and she always keeps her young (female?) reader in mind.

This is, on the surface, a 'fun' book but it does incorporate a layer of light social commentary and documents features of popular culture: the autobiography is packed with contextual references to shops, fashion, records, cinema, television and food of the early 60s. What should prove fascinating to contemporary readers are the contrasts she draws between the lifestyle of a 21st-century teenage girl and her 60s counterpart, e.g. her contrast between the ubiquitous 60s Woolworths where she bought everything from stationery to make-up with the present wide consumer choice of Topshop, Primark, Claire's Accessories etc.

But as a budding writer Woolworths was where she sourced her writing materials, beginning with sixpenny exercise books and biros (no glitzy gel pens in those days). She demonstrates her love of writing implements with her descriptions of the luxury stationery now available 'beautiful Italian marbled notebooks ...'

Wilson is very conscious of the absence of books written for children in the early 1960s and she recalls the adult books that she read as a child, showing her voracious appetite for fiction of all calibres e.g. Monica Dickens, Rumer Godden and taboo books such as Lolita and Peyton Place. Retrospectively she now admits to finding Lolita 'disgusting' and strongly recommends her young readers not to touch it. This is one aspect of her autobiography that may not work, i.e. the occasional exhortation to her audience not to read/do certain things that she read and did.

One of the main qualities of the book is the way that Wilson documents her own reading and shows how it stimulated her early writing: this could be an encouragement to her audience to read more widely and to produce their own writing, however private.