The quality of Emin's writing is another nice surprise. But after the uneasy squalor of her childhood in Margate, it comes as a relief.
It ain't very rock'n'roll - they pick olives, go to the seaside and exchange family gossip. The middle section of the book takes place in Turkey, where she finds some kind of peace exploring her roots and bonding with her estranged father. While her best-known art has shown Emin at her most confrontational, in her writing, we meet a calmer, more sensitive soul. And it describes, movingly, how she was left holding a dead foetus in the back of a London taxi five days after her botched abortion.īut the real revelations here are of a gentler kind. It details with some relish her stinking flat, her alcoholism and her wanking habits. It follows her down the dark alley where she was raped, aged 13. Those who do want more detail on all the best-known Emin myths won't be disappointed by Strangeland. How much more do we want or need to know? Even her grubby sheets have been on display at the Tate. She has made exhibitions out of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, her abortion and her darkest feelings of loss, self-doubt and betrayal. Thanks to her embroidered tent, Everyone I've Ever Slept With, we know more about her sex life than we do about most of our friends. After all, Emin has forged her artistic career on making a public display of the most shocking and personal elements of her life story. Tracey Emin is at a strategic disadvantage when it comes to writing her autobiography - we know most of the juicy bits already. A remarkable book - and an original, beautiful mind. Her capacity both to create controversies and to strike chords is unequalled in British life. Tracey retains a profoundly romantic world view, paired with an uncompromising honesty. Her writings, a combination of memoirs and confessions, are deeply intimate, yet powerfully engaging. Tracey Emin's Strangeland is her own space, lying between the Margate of her childhood, the Turkey of her forefathers and her own, private-public life in present-day London. Here I am, a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless, beautiful woman. Tracey Emin, Strangeland, Hodder & Stoughton, 2006.
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