She looks well on all the renunciations. She is wearing new trainers, turned-up jeans, a transparent black top over a black bra, a big gold necklace and gold earrings. She looks more than half Turkish-Cypriot, which is what she is. She has the skin of a teenager and the figure of a 1950s movie star. But there’s nothing generic about her face. She has thick, angry black eyebrows. One reason, she says, that people always say Frida Kahlo is one of her favourite artists — she isn’t — is that they are both monobrows. Her mouth is contorted and somehow aggressive. It is probably the result of having her teeth knocked out and replaced as a teenager, but the face and character have become one. “Look at me,” says the body, “want me.” “Think you can handle me?” says the face.
Her studio is a two-storey industrial building. She is leaving in a few weeks, for a place behind her house. She has grown sick of the air-gun pellets and bricks that periodically break her windows. Downstairs, girls — her assistants — greet me in reception and, upstairs, more girls are flicking purposefully through magazines. A punk blonde wanders in and takes a 7-Up out of the fridge. Everything is hugely underdesigned. The kitchen is absolutely basic; what look like Bhs wicker shades cover the lights. I sit on a sofa that is part of an old three-piece suite around a nest of tables. I am left with my thoughts and a pot of tea. Then, from the stairway, come two strange meows, and here is Tracey.
“Hello, Bryan,” she says, sweetly and quietly, but then: “That’s my seat.” I am evicted to a mere chair.
Anyway, back in the 1990s, she was drunk in a pub, watching the Grand National, and got into an argument about philosophy with the bloke next to her. “What do you know about philosophy?” she asked him. “Well, I’m doing a PhD. What do you know? Who’s your favourite philosopher?” “Spinoza.”
A friendship began. In 1998, now very famous, Tracey was given an advance by Hodder & Stoughton to write a book. Then, in 1999, she was nominated for the Turner prize. “Everything went really weird and elevated to somewhere else. I didn’t have time to sit at home and write. And, anyway, I wanted to write a novel, to stretch my mind. I said to the publishers, ‘I’m going to give you your money back, there’s no way I’m going to sit at home, writing a book.’ It was just ludicrous. They just said, ‘Take all the time you need.’” Then her philosopher friend turned up. He’s called Nicholas Blincoe, and he now worked for Hodder. She handed over four big boxes of her writings and, a few months later, he handed over a rather small book.
“I was supposed to edit it, but I wouldn’t look at it, I wouldn’t touch it. Some of it is 25 years old, a teenager’s diary — it’s demented. But then, when I did read it, I really liked it. I changed names, places and dates — you wouldn’t believe what I had to change. But the essence of the book was there. Some bits I didn’t like. I felt they didn’t flow properly, or were repetitive. There could have been four different versions of one story. I amalgamated them. But the book I’ve written is the book every publisher wanted me to do.”
Luckily, I avoid asking here if it was ghosted in any way. Someone else did that and got an earful. “I said, ‘How f***ing dare you? Do you think I would actually have some pride and dignity over this if I’d not written it?’ That’s going to be a shock to people, when they see I’ve actually written it.” She is proud of it, but also insecure. In one sentence, she moves from saying the book is “f***ing brilliant” to — head down, staring at fingers — “all right”. It is, in fact, very good, much better than I expected. It is primarily about her upbringing in Margate. She was raped and sexually abused and, as a teenager, she was wildly and dangerously promiscuous. She could dance, and once cleared a dancefloor with her gyrations, but then ran off when she realised that all the boys were chanting: “Slag, slag, slag.” The family was broken, and they were dirt poor.
In spite of all of which, she is lyrical and warm about those years. The reason seems to be an obsessive imaginative self-sufficiency. She was constantly making alternative houses. She could spend hours just moving furniture around, creating homes. To this day, she collects little girlie things, doll’s-house furniture.
I suddenly notice that there are two old children’s chairs next to our three-piece suite. Once, when she was 10, she came home and there was a huge new sideboard in the house.
“It was in the most haunted room. It was like oak, with another layer to it, a piece of marble. When my mum came home, I had pulled the thing across the room — it had taken four men to bring it in — and I was trying to get it out of the house. I was screaming, ‘Get it out of here, it’s got a coffin in it.’ It was a phenomenal feat of strength.”
She has always been possessed. There used to be seances at home, and Emin still claims certain gifts. She reads character from keys, for example. She declines to do mine, but explains the process. “A person who’s got a massive big bunch, they’ve got a lot of responsibility. If they’re a bit chipped and rusty, they’re not paying attention to themselves, possibly to their health. If they’ve got expensive Banham keys and one cheap key, there’s a part of their life they’re not doing anything about. Everybody has different keys. I told someone from their keys that something terrible had happened to them six years before, and it turned out they went bankrupt.”
She’s uneasy about words such as psychic and mystic — she just thinks there’s something else going on. “I like dreaming, I enjoy the other side. For me, it’s more scientific. Of course this isn’t it. If you think this is it, this is it for you — sad f***. Of course this isn’t it, it can’t be. There’s loads of other stuff around us that we don’t see: we’ve become deaf to it and blind to it and insensitive to it.”
We talk about third realms, the sixth sense of cats and dogs. I ask her if any of this is in her art.
“It is in my art, it’s just ignored because people all look at the f***ing and sex, and they miss all that completely.”
She’s being misunderstood? “No, my art is understood fantastically. The sex and f***ing are quite correct, and they can focus on that. But they miss out on this whole load of other stuff.”
She says she is not religious, and no longer seems to think, as she used to, that she is living through the last of many reincarnations.But her sense of the numinous is real and strong. It is almost certainly what got her through the fractured and shocking childhood described in the book. Something else gets her through life now.
