Tracy Beaker author Jacqueline Wilson marked the end of her marriage to a man with a therapeutic dance routine incredibly titled “Stamp on Your Man”.
The bestselling children’s laureate publicly came out as gay earlier this year, revealing that she’d been in a happy relationship with a woman for 18 years.
Wilson, now 75, found herself herself unexpectedly single in her mid-50s after her husband left her. She handled it in the best way imaginable – by joining an all-female line-dancing group.
She found a “cracking bunch of women” at a dancehall in Kingston where “everybody had a lovely, funny sense of humour, and a slightly jaundiced view of men,” she told the Spectator.
She remembered how they helped her through the pain of her breakup with one memorable dance to the tune of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man”, retitled “Stamp on Your Man”.
“It was just therapeutic and fun,” she laughed.
After six years of singledom Wilson met her partner Trish, a bookseller, at an event. Keen to see her again, Wilson decided to go about it the old fashioned way and wrote her a letter.
“I really enjoyed our talk and I’d love to do an event with you…” the letter read. Unfortunately the romantic impulse behind it went totally unnoticed. “Trish took me utterly, to the letter, seriously!” Wilson said.
But she eventually got the message and the pair have been committed to each other ever since. They eloped in Vermont in 2008 with just two friends present as witnesses.
The author previously recalled a friend once telling her: “I don’t think you are a lesbian, I think you are a Trishian.” Wilson replied: “I think that really sums me up.”
