So the clarity with which she expresses herself in her memoirs is a visceral nudity of no little discomfort: “I'm alcoholic, neurotic, psychotic, a whinging loser obsessed with myself but I'm an artist." Sex, drug abuse and hangovers were her environment while art was a private, stable place away from all of that. Tracey Emin is a survivor of her own adolescent meltdown. It's almost akin to therapy, aiding her recovery from certain periods in her life, all of which were marked by searing pain and resentment.
She uses artistic creation to recreate her own memories. With a painfully complicated childhood and adolescence (raped at thirteen, incest, abortions, anorexia, alcoholism, poverty, social rejection, …), the artist here reveals her recurring episodes of suffering, humiliation and trauma with brutal and unchecked frankness.
Tracey Emin in 2014 (Image available at For this reason, Emin's artistic output cannot be fully understood without reference to her life and this is not to state the obvious just for the sake of it. She has made what was once cutting-edge ~ the merging of intimacy, art and life to make something insoluble ~ into a new, confessional-style, conventional artform. And this without falling into the trap of clichéd judgements on her provocativeness or exhibitionism, precisely because her personal history and her artistic identity are intertwined so fascinatingly and so irreverently. It gave me faith in my own existence." And this is how bluntly Tracey Emin (Surrey, 1963) writes in her explosive autobiography Strangeland (Sceptre, 2005 Spanish translation published 2016), a collection of personal writings and reminiscences that allow us an insight into an undoubtedly complex persona.