I'm very proud to be described as a gay icon...

Former children's laureate Dame Jacqueline Wilson talks sex, marriage and spicing up her second book for adults. HANNAH STEPHENSON finds out more

- AUTHOR Dame Jacqueline Wilson

confesses that the passionate sex scenes in her second book for adults have left her wondering how friends and family will react.

"I have to forget that everybody who is a friend of mine or family might be going to read it, because otherwise you get tremendously hot under the collar and embarrassed about it," the sprightly bestselling author of more than 100 books and creator of Tracy Beaker admits.

"I just live in the moment of my characters."

At 79, the former children's laureate has written Picture Imperfect, a followup to her children's book The Illustrated Mum (adapted into a TV movie in 2003 starring Michelle Collins), which introduced the eponymous parent, tattoo-adorned Marigold, and her two daughters, Dolphin and Star as they try to come to terms with their mother's depression and instability.

Fast forward two decades and Picture Imperfect finds Dolphin, 33, now a talented tattoo artist, struggling to move on, living in a bedsit and trying to care for Marigold who has bipolar disorder and is hospitalised. Meanwhile, her sister Star is a doctor, and is seemingly not putting in enough effort to help as she lives in Scotland with her family.

Dolphin hopes romance will save her and is torn between dependable but boring gardener Lee and his daughter Ava or exciting lothario actor Joel.

The sex scenes in the book range from functional to frantic, in tandem with the characters.

"I thought about this carefully because, well, if Beatrix Potter had suddenly started writing some steamy adult novel, because you get identified with your childhood characters it would seem a little strange," says Jacqueline.

"But I thought, if I'm writing for adults, generally people do have sex lives, or want to have sex lives, or are quite happy not to have sex lives, but aware they are not having them. So I thought, this is part of life."