DIARIES&MEMOIRS

cynicism of her visual art argues against the easy answers provided by cliché or the recourse to self-improving platitudes, this is the awkward note on which her book ends: ‘I have found a way to visit without fear, exorcising all ghosts from the past to fill my mind with something mind-blowing.’ Strangeland splits into three parts: Motherland, Fatherland and Traceyland – all variants on a crumbling, melancholy amusement arcade in Margate called Dreamland. Each is composed of fragments of memory, dream, and fantasy, plus snatches of experimental writing on themes such as what it feels like to be pregnant, to get no cards on Valentine’s Day, or to dislike food. Motherland, in which Emin’s adored mum is an atmosphere rather than anything more solid, begins with Emin’s birth (‘I somehow felt a mistake had been made’) and goes on to give us the childhood with her twin brother on the Margate seafront (‘where there was nothing to do but blend in with the general decay: bum around, fuck, be fucked, bum and wish your life away’), the fall from riches to poverty (when her Turkish Cypriot father went bankrupt and the Emins moved from living in his hotel to living in a dump), her sexual abuse and rape as a child, and her leaving school at thirteen. In Fatherland, the figure who was only an atmosphere in her childhood becomes a visceral presence; a boasting, boozing, womanising bar-room bore. Emin’s time with him and his family in Turkey is presented in the sepia that abandoned children sometimes reserve for the abandoning parent. The final part of the book, which takes place almost entirely in the bed we know so well, gives us other material with which we are also familiar, like her abortions, anorexia, boozing and promiscuity. It is all part of Traceyland, that odd mix of Tory values and tawdry habits which has chiselled its way into our cultural landscape. Part of Tracey Emin’s charm is her lack of formal education, which gives her work a freedom from the burden of the past. It is the sheer banalityof her material, when in the form of a bed or a tent, that makes it an original and provocative contribution to the visual arts. But when she presents her world as a book in a literary tradition that goes back to Saint Augustine, the force of her confessions simply fades away. It is not that Strangelandis insincere in its attempt to deal with an interesting life in an interesting way; on the contrary, its appalling sincerity is what makes it seem so very uninteresting. With Emin’s visual art there is at least an element of humour, which gives her some vital distance from herself; her writing, whilst having about it the same vulnerable appeal, lacks the playfulness of her other performances. It may be that first editions of Strangeland will sell for £5,000 in ten years’ time. But until then, don’t give up the day job, Tracey. To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 78

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006