On Tracey Emin's writing

'I wasn’t confessing anything at all to anybody. Nothing to confess. I was just trying to unravel everything and work out where it all came from'

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The most exciting literary happening for me this year occurred on the right-hand wall of the first room of the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Tate Modern. Nine A4 pieces of paper are framed behind glass, hanging in three rows of three. ‘TRACEY EMIN C.V.’ is written across the top of the first, and then: ‘Concieved in Ireland. 1962 – Same time as my twin brother – It was the last night my mum + DAD were supposed to have spent together’. By the bottom of the first page, it’s 1968, and she ‘BIT MRS MAN on the Elbow – + ran away – SPENT the next 5 years becoming more + more strange’ .

At the bottom of the second page, ‘Hated school – with all my heart – So did Paul – we left by the time we were 13’. Then ‘January 1977 I was rapped down AN Ally – Spent 6 months avoiding men + all cost – beast grew – pubic hair became thicker period started – hair under my arms sprouted – WAM’.

By the bottom of the sixth page, ‘1987-89 – went to the Royal College OF ART – Absolutely amazing – After all that I’d been through – I’d say – these were the worst two years of my life – OH TO COME TO TERMS WITH SUCH HUMBLE BEGGININGS – IN SUCH – A FUCKING UNSIMPATHETIC SHIT HOLE’.

In one fell blow – or nine pages of uneven writing and misspellings – she makes a mockery of those two letters which have always caused a defensive fear. Yes, this is a real CV, one thinks standing in front of it, a real syllabus of life – she has brought the body into the CV, and the family, and the particular horrific events she was subject to as a child and teenager, and that many of us are – how ridiculous, how totally ridiculous, the notion of a CV with all of these excised becomes, in light of this work – how ridiculous the Times New Roman corralling of exam results and institutions and ‘extra-curricular’ activities, as though a person can be explained and understood by those markers alone.

When I was a child, my father interviewed prospective job candidates. At the dinner table, the night before an interview, he discussed them with my mother, which is when I first heard the term ‘a gap in the CV’. This meant, I was told, time not accounted for on that typed-up piece of paper. Someone had been doing something in their life, and it wasn’t something that belonged in the sharp, hard summary of that piece of paper, and therefore that potential employee was a risk. To spend time – months or even years – doing something that was seen as not relevant to employment, or even to one’s overall professed direction, was a sign, to employers like my father, of irresponsibility, unreliability, caprice. This struck fear into me, even then. My life was a ledger, which had to be accounted for in a particular way, otherwise I would be considered to have fallen off the rails? (Even that phrase ‘off the rails’, which I heard a lot as a child – which rails is one on in the first place, and to where?)

And life happens, and bad things do happen – men do things, screw up your education, violate you, and then the ones who come along afterwards to ‘help’ you end up dominating and interfering, not helping. No CV I have ever seen accounts for these things – and then I saw Emin’s. And this is what art does, that literature alone does not – it can break down the form of things in the real world, can present a material object that is similar to another material object – can indeed call itself the same thing, a CV – but in its differences shows up the nature of the power that that first object has arrogated to itself, and so the second object, the artist’s object, by revealing that power, can break it down – perhaps not instantly in a societal sense, but certainly instantly psychically, if that piece of art pierces us, and I can say that those nine pages of Emin’s pierced me. How silly the conventional CV looks next to Emin’s; her CV makes the world of institutions – the establishment that once told her, and everybody else, that she was silly – seem flimsy, empty, impaired. Her CV puts back onto that world the feeling it has put into all of us, those who couldn’t fit or generate the summary it demanded, a summary that is void of all that life really is, the psyche, the body, the family, pain, triumph, rejection, escape.

'Tracey Emin C.V.', 1995

‘When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her’, wrote Adrienne Rich. Walking through the exhibition, it becomes painfully, suddenly clear how much of women’s lives have not been told, by themselves. I had not seen a painting by a woman of a rape, until I saw Emin’s. I had not heard an account of an abortion anything like the account she gives in ‘How it feels’. That film is shown in a room which you have to cross to continue the exhibition. As the film was playing, the room was so packed with viewers, eyes fixed on screen, that it was barely possible to reach the other side. There were fifteen-year-old girls, sixty-year-old men. They were all captivated, listening to a then-33-year-old woman talking about an abortion, talking about the sadistic Christian doctor whose negligence almost killed her. And if you’ve had an abortion, which you knew you had to have but nevertheless were utterly traumatised by, Tracey Emin’s account of her own abortion is manna, is a kind of releasing, strengthening embrace. ‘No one makes up their mind to have an abortion,’ she says, ‘you make up your mind that you can’t have the child. And then you do whatever that takes.’ She speaks of the emotional suicide she went through afterwards, of the total change that the abortion occasioned in her life, including giving up painting for five years. In the aftermath of my own abortion, when I too went through an emotional suicide, I was totally, utterly alone with it. I could find no one who was saying what Tracey Emin says in that film. I was told that as I had decided to have the abortion, I must be either making up the psychological pain for my own enjoyment, or that the pain didn’t make sense – there must be something wrong with me – with my mind. I hope, I desperately hope, that someone else in my situation finds Tracey Emin’s story faster than I did. So much of feminism has been concerned, as Rich put it, with ‘making visible the experience of women…in ignorance of their place in any female tradition’; it has been concerned with countering what Shulamith Firestone called the ‘blackout of feminist history’ that keeps ‘women hysterically circling through a maze of false solutions’.

We are so near the beginning of that journey, I found myself thinking in the exhibition – as cleansing as it felt to stand in front of her art, it also felt tragic. I wish it didn’t all feel so new. I wish women’s accounts of abuse and abortion and rape were in art galleries as much as their naked bodies, painted by men. There is still so much more that has not been told – so many of us have lived lives strangled by silence, by the taboo on women speaking. More and more, the 1990s and 2000s look like a shitshow. In 2004, on Desert Island Discs, Sue Lawley can state, accusingly, that Emin ‘became promiscuous’ after she was abused, a ‘promiscuity’ better phrased in legal terms as being the victim of grooming and further statutory rapes.

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I spent the afternoon of Easter Sunday sitting at the table in the Tate Modern bookshop, reading Martin Gayford’s book of interviews with Emin about painting, My Heart is This. She says:

‘A lot of people have faith in what they’re doing when everybody’s saying it’s good and they’re getting really good reviews and everyone’s buying it and it’s selling like hotcakes, especially when you’re young. But when you go ten years of everybody thinking what you do is shit and you’ve got no audience, you’ve got no gallery…and you still carry on doing it and you keep pushing yourself. That’s faith. Weirdly enough, I know some people who are much older and they’ve just kept doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it, and then – poof! – something happens. Ping, they’re there. They’re suddenly showing. They’ve suddenly caught up with me, or they’ve caught up with the really young person who’s doing exceptionally well. But often people go into the doldrums or disappear and get lost at sea.’

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What is unusual about Emin is that she doesn’t harden herself against feelings we are told to harden ourselves against, often as part of feminist politics – shame, embarrassment, discomfort in our own bodies. She is as overcome by those things as any of us are – but then turns them into something else. ‘Back in the 90s, people used to say it was confessional art. It wasn’t. I wasn’t confessing anything at all to anybody. Nothing to confess. I was just trying to unravel everything and work out where it all came from, and why this was this, and why that was that. I wasn’t trying to shock anybody, either.’ Those feelings, for her, since they are facts, deserve narrating, displaying, showing, just like any other fact of someone’s life. As Jacqueline Rose writes in Women in Dark Times: ‘Scandal commonly refers to a moment when something which should have remained hidden loses its moorings and erupts into the world. Feminism has long argued that the distinction is spurious – that intimacy, while not reducible to, is never wholly immune from the violence and political power of the outside world.’ It is the patriarchy which makes a woman telling what has happened to her into a ‘confession’; it is the patriarchy which, cleverly, transfers guilt from itself to the woman. A few years ago there was a pernicious notion, in writing circles, that women were writing accounts of trauma simply to get published, and that in doing so they were feeding some prurient, perhaps anti-feminist, maw opened by the mass media. I heard a (male) creative writing tutor say as much. Bullshit, absolute bullshit. For virtually all of history, the public forum has been shut to women’s accounts of what has happened to them. At long last, it’s not – basically because the internet isn’t subject to the space restrictions of print – and – guess what – there are already too many women speaking! Time to shut them up again.

Of course, it’s safe to fall in love with Tracey Emin now that she has become that dreadful phrase, a ‘national treasure’; there is no longer risk in standing up for her art. It is the younger artists and writers, the women being ignored or ridiculed today, being told they are narcissistic or solipsistic or moany or ignorant or self-absorbed, that I want to hunt for and read and watch and listen to. Tracey Emin’s writing is, to me, a hell of a lot more interesting than Montaigne’s. I don’t recall him ever being accused, at least not in the critical literature I read, of pathological narcissism: he was ‘curious’, a ‘self-investigator’, part of the birth of modernity, an inspirer of Hamlet. Risible, all of it, the whole male canon.¹ I was pleased to see Emin included in a Cambridge University Press book on contemporary feminist life-writing, in an essay on ‘new audacity in the writing of rape’, alongside Virginie Despentes and Jana Leo. She has changed how I understand myself. To write something that occasions someone else to say that is why some of us who chain ourselves to the pen do so.

Works mentioned

Tracey Emin: A Second Life at the Tate Modern, ends 31 August

Tracey Emin on Desert Island Discs, November 2004

‘Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying’ in On Lies Secrets & Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 by Adrienne Rich (W. W. Norton & Company, 1979)

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone (William Morrow & Company, 1970; Verso, 2015)

Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose (Bloomsbury, 2014; Fitzcarraldo, 2025)

My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting by Martin Gayford (Thames & Hudson, 2026)

How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ (University of Texas Press, 1983, 2018)

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity by Jennifer Cooke (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

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1. The notion and construction of it, I mean, not the works in it. I – we – have all known this – I wasn’t born yesterday – but it is in walking through a mass of work like that of Emin that makes you realise, as Joanna Russ put it, that ‘the amount of experience left out of the official literary canon is simply staggering’. What we were educated to believe was the centre (and what pupils are still being educated to believe is the centre, by the way: in 2024, just 5% of GCSE English students studied a whole novel or play written by a woman) looks narrower than ever, and the margins many, many times wider.

A 19^th-century forerunner of Emin can be found at the V&A East, which opened in April and is well worth visiting. On a sampler, a young woman servant, instead of stitching her catechisms, has stitched her pain: ‘As i cannot write I put this down simply and freely as I might speak to a person to whose intimacy and tenderness I can fully intrust myself and who I know will bear with all my weaknesses...’

I realise some people did not have as conservative an education as I had, and were made aware of the limitations of the canon a lot earlier. Lucky them. I am probably writing this defensively, but the process of stripping out the crap – the ‘masculine ideologies’ that are ‘the creation of masculine subjectivity’, and ‘are neither objective, nor value-free, nor inclusively ‘human’’, as Rich put it – takes many, many years, and is ongoing. Vertiginous shifts still happen.