Ego trip with excess baggage

Readers may sympathise with Tracey Emin. Her big mouth and huge appetite for self- advertisement make her a ready target; she’s so shameless and yet, by her own account, so abused. (‘And then they started: “SLAG, SLAG, SLAG.” A gang of blokes, most of whom I’d had sex with at some time or other…’) Life has dealt her a raw yet currently rewarding deal. And now that she’s a proper celebrity, as real as Cindy Sherman — the photographer of a thousand guises — and much more in-your-face, she owes it to her public to keep delivering, living her dreams, spicing resolutions with relapses.

Margate’s most famous daughter grew up in what were, by her account, intermittently abject circumstances. A mostly absent Turkish Cypriot father, a mother resourceful enough to help herself to lead from roofs when broke, a fitful formal education, a feral sex education and catastrophic front teeth: she had it all up to here, that’s to say up to the point where she had to either sink or swim. Buoyant, she finds herself, at the age of 42, issuing an autobiography that wrings out the memories with a self-indulgence bordering on infatuation. ‘I thought with my body,’ she claims. Leading with her chin, she has filled these pages using lots of old material, pieces reprinted from ID magazine (‘The Proper Steps for Dealing with an Unwanted Pregnancy’), GQ (‘The Mummy Screams’) and other such outlets.

These writings are a mixture of heartfelt missives and slurp resembling homework long overdue. They read like extended versions of her insecurity blankets, the ones with attractively misspelt words appliquéd all over, though here, for once, Spellcheck has been employed.

‘Trying to make sense of everything’, as she says, is a fitful task.