Dame Jacqueline Wilson is 63 but her autobiography takes her only up to when she was 11: the age, she said, when childhood stops and the anxieties, yearnings and self-consciousness of adolescence begin.

Today's children grow up too fast, she believes, and parents should be stricter: kids strive for independence but secretly want boundaries. This may be the key to her success as a children's writer: the understanding that the stroppier the child, the more desperate she is for love and security, just like Tracy Beaker, her most popular heroine, who lives in a care home and is the star of books, a long-running television series and a musical. “Tracy makes children who have a rough deal feel less alone,” she explains.

Wilson wrote her memoir, Jacky Daydream, when she was made Children's Laureate and heard that her publishers were looking for someone to write her biography. “Call me a control freak,” she said, “but I decided I wanted to write it myself, to decide what went in and, more importantly, what was left out.”

As a child she had friends but felt like the odd one out - a feeling that she recognises from the hundreds of letters she receives from readers. But she was also the only child of warring parents: “It is not elegant at my age to whimper,” she has said, “but it was not a tranquil home.”

She got out of the family's council flat in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, at 17, moving up to Durham to live alone and work for the children's publishers DC Thompson, who liked her stories so much that they named their new magazine after her. Jackie became a bible for millions of teenage girls in the Sixties. At 19, she married her policeman boyfriend and had her daughter, Emma, at 21. Her career took off in 1982 when she started producing books for children.

She is known for tackling the grittier realities of childhood - divorce, alcoholic parents, bullying, loneliness - always from the child's point of view. A reviewer identiified Wilson's killer instinct: “She knows what girls want to read about and gives it to them.”

As well as book sales of 20 million, the Wilson brand is an energetic merchandiser and the bedrooms of countless little girls are filled with Tracy Beaker pencil cases, duvet covers and lamps.

At book signings and celebrity appearances the author cuts a bohemian figure: cropped hair, owl spectacles, dressed in black velvet and silver witchy boots with fingers encrusted in rings looking like “Ziggy Stardust's grandmother”, as one observer noted. And she enjoys the adulation: “Just when nobody notices you in the street any more,” she says, “to be treated like some ageing rock star with kids all shouting, ‘Look! It's her!' It's wonderful.”

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