We encounter this star not in LA but in Margate, where the gull-strafed promenade is a sunset boulevard in its own right. The light on the Kentish riviera has drawn artists since Turner\u2019s day. A Norma Desmond needs her amanuensis, and here that part is played by the critic Martin Gayford instead of William Holden\u2019s washed-up screenwriter. <\/p>\n
The book pulls no punches about the artist\u2019s cancer diagnosis. The first page is an unsparing inventory of the body parts she\u2019s lost<\/p>\n
Gayford is an established confidant of painters, the artist-whisperer of Lucian Freud and David Hockney. He elicits a remarkable trove of information and opinion from Emin, who has sometimes proved a prickly interviewee in the past. The author shepherds their conversation through chapters about subjects including the artist\u2019s early life and career, her influences, and why painting matters above everything else. My Heart Is This is the story of how a dark stretch in her life led Emin to a new love and appreciation of paint and greater facility at the canvas. It will appeal to her many fans as well as the gallery crowd, though it is refreshingly free of art guff.<\/p>\n
The book pulls no punches about the artist\u2019s diagnosis of squamous cell bladder cancer<\/a>, in 2020, and the extent of the surgery that followed. The first page is an unsparing inventory of the body parts she\u2019s lost: \u201cuterus, ovaries, lymph nodes, urethra, part of her colon, urinary tract and her entire bladder. She thought she might have six months to live.\u201d <\/p>\n Not surprisingly, Emin is often tired and spends three days a week in bed, where she attends to her correspondence and receives visitors. We may imagine Gayford at the foot of her \u201cluxuriant divan\u201d which has \u201cmega-expensive thread sheets\u201d, according to Emin. <\/p>\n It\u2019s a far cry from \u201cMy Bed\u201d, the scandalisingly lived-in piece of furniture that is her best-known work. Since this book is supposed to be about the art of paint, Gayford makes a stout attempt to claim \u201cMy Bed\u201d as a kind of painting, but he\u2019s on surer ground when he calls it a self-portrait. Emin herself says, \u201cWe die in bed, fuck in bed, we give birth in bed.\u201d Her once notorious work claims a place among the most celebrated sleeping quarters in art history, made by such giants as Titian, Delacroix and Manet. <\/p>\n When Emin was a child, her Turkish father and English mother ran a hotel in Margate but, as she recalls in these pages, for much of her life the town was a place she was in flight from: where she was abused and raped as a youngster, where she threw herself off the harbour wall in a suicide attempt aged 20. Now, says Gayford, \u201cEmin has come back to Margate and sizeable parts of it are quite literally hers.\u201d <\/p>\n From the bedroom at the heart of her property portfolio, Emin commands a home and atelier and a teaching space for budding artists, as well as an old pavilion on the front which she plans to develop as a studio-cum-saltwater spa. Emin\u2019s conceptual pieces seem to be a thing of the past. These days, her practice is just her and her paints, though she has a faithful retainer, her creative director Harry Weller.<\/p>\n Emin and Margate have helped each other come back to life. Madonna has been to stay and enthused about the revitalised resort. Despite Emin\u2019s frailty, she swims in the \u201ccold green water of the North Sea\u201d, she tells Gayford.<\/p>\n When she was young and poor with nowhere to keep her canvases, she destroyed them instead. As a student at the Royal College of Art, she was required to donate a painting to her alma mater. But the one her teachers chose, a portrait of her two nans, was her favourite, so she switched it in secret for a much poorer work and had to endure sitting in front of it at a gala dinner where the men next to her derided it and even changed seats to escape it. <\/p>\n Now she has produced \u201ca bumper harvest of extraordinary paintings\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009fraught, tender, powerful, harrowing, beautiful\u201d, says Gayford. It\u2019s a curious thing to say of a successful artist but Emin has always been winningly artless. <\/p>\n The bombshell she drops this time is: \u201ccancer\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. was brilliant for me\u201d. It made her value everything she had and make the most of every day. In this intimate and unexpectedly cheering book, she says, \u201cI just got happier and happier\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009and I\u2019ve got this amazing career I didn\u2019t have before.\u201d Tracey Emin is back, and like Norma Desmond, she\u2019s ready for her close-up.<\/p>\n My Heart Is This: Tracey Emin on Painting by Martin Gayford Thames & Hudson \u00a325, 256 pages <\/p>\n Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9<\/a> and follow FT Weekend on Instagram<\/a>, Bluesky<\/a> and X<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Tracey](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/https:\/\/d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net\/production\/edd30849-d012-43d8-bd5e-75406ee47b03.jpg\")
Tracey Emin photographed in her Margate studio with \u2018The Crucifixion\u2019, 2025 \u00a9 Juergen Teller<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/https:\/\/d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net\/production\/b8688d9e-ee12-4ac2-885a-0739b7194301.png\")
<\/p>\n