Tracey Emin had seen some pictures of herself at 18.

“A shudder of sadness shot through me. I wish I wasn’t 42. I’d be happy to be 32. I don’t behave like it, I don’t look it, I don’t feel it. I am it.”

She falls silent, her head drops and she seems to be staring at her writhing, interlocked fingers. Then, wistfully: “Be good to have a break, wouldn’t it? I think I’d like to share my life with someone — that would be really nice. I would like to back off a bit, live a bit through someone else, I’d like to be taken...”

Then, later: “Most women, by this time, would have a break. I have no break, I have no respite. I would like to have more, to be taken round the world for a year. I’d like to go to Alaska and the Arctic, and look at baby seals and polar bears.”

She has been alone for nearly three years — she is planning a party for the anniversary — since her relationship with her fellow YBA Mat Collishaw broke up. She makes a joke out of it, then her head drops and she stares at her fingers. The worst moment comes when I ask about having a baby. A dose of gonorrhoea years ago had led to her doctor telling her she would never conceive. Then she did, and she had an abortion. I ask her if she can have a baby now.

“No,” she says impatiently, “I can’t, because I don’t f*** anyone. How could I have a baby?”

No, I meant is she able to?

“Yeah. I was kind of okay about not having a baby until I got pregnant.” Head down, staring at fingers, she says no more. This time, it’s too much. I change the subject.

Down where the City suddenly stops and the East End, equally suddenly, begins, down behind Hawksmoor’s staggering, glorious Christ Church, down in Spitalfields near Gilbert & George, in the old and extravagantly gentrified Huguenot houses in Fournier Street, lives Tracey Emin. The house — I don’t see it, because we meet at her nearby studios — is, she brags, very clean.

“I am the Howard Hughes of Fournier Street. I have a cleaner every day. That’s more than people with children and dogs and things. It’s because I like my house to be comfortable and spotless.” Those who saw her celebrated work My Bed — her own violently unmade bed, complete with the grubby detritus of her then wild life — may be surprised by this.

“Yeah, that bed was genuine, that was real. After that bed left, I went off to Selfridges and spent a thousand quid on bedding: three duvets with different tog weights, silk sheets. I’m constantly making homes, not nest-building, not fluffing up things, but walls, security, structure. I’m trying to create my own boundaries, my own security.” Her famous tent, with the names of all the people she had ever slept with, becomes all too obviously an expression of her need for home and love. Now Tracey the wild thing has, for the moment, gone, to be replaced by Tracey the responsible. “Yeah, I ’ve given up loads of things, I’m a new person.”

Once, she appeared on television so drunk, she knew nothing about it the next morning, until her friends started ringing and she saw the papers. She had staggered off the set muttering something about having to call her mum. She was hardly ever photographed without a drink in her hand, and her benders were infamous. But she has given up spirits, chocolate, cigarettes, coffee. She says she has hardly had a drink since she passed her driving test six weeks ago: “It’s all part of the big change.” She goes to bed at 9pm and is wide awake at 3am. Then she writes furiously: “A letter, about 2,000 words, to a friend last night.” Tracey is clean, responsible.

“In 1997, when the election was on, Jeremy Paxman asked me to do a programme about what changes I’d like to see. Then, it was 24-hour drinking. Now, I’d be opposed to it. What was okay 10 years ago is not all right now. What is all right now may change in the future. As an adult, you’re allowed to change your ideas. But what is important is the motivation, the essence of that change. You work it out, the reasoning behind why this is not good for you, why it’s not good for a certain entity at a certain time.”