She is famous for creating the messiest bed in art history and for wandering drunk from a TV discussion of the Turner Prize under the impression she was round at a friend's, but this morning Tracey Emin is the perfect hostess. It's Monday, 11am at her studio in the East End and she insists on making me coffee from an espresso machine and even heating the milk.
She apologises for the negligible muddle in the corner, where she is making space to write a novel, commissioned by Sceptre for 80,000, and shows off the indoor garden she is working on with her father. Vivienne Westwood drips from a hanger, but Tracey is actually wearing a sexy light cocktail dress bearing a neat, thigh-level cigarette hole, carefully stitched around in white cotton.
If she were to tell me Charles Saatchi had bought the dress, or indeed the hole, for 20 big ones I'd believe her, partly because, although she has, in both senses, a big mouth - it deranges her beauty - it does not tell lies, and partly because last weekend it was reported he had paid 150,000 for that much maligned and much soiled mattress.
"It's true. He has," she says, a mite abashed, when I ring to confirm what she had concealed from me during the interview - an uncharacteristic discretion from an otherwise dreamily garrulous interviewee, and a charming and funny one too. It's the most she has ever earned and her mum is thrilled.
Nevertheless, her dealer, Jay Jopling, keeps half and it is not as if she is going to run up another one, like Monet and his lilies. As for Mrs Thatcher's adman, at least he displays what he buys. "He's an art collector," she says protectively, "not an arms dealer." She was thrilled enough anyway by what she had made during the run of last year's Turner Prize at the Tate, in which My Bed was the main but not prize-winning attraction. The 250,000 worth of sales softened the "cruel and immoral" attacks of the critics who had chosen the moment to turn against Britain's most confessional artist.
She has now concluded that the Tate used her, trading on the publicity she generates wherever she goes but never intending her to win. "You'll never see a f***ing radical win the f***ing Turner Prize," she says. You will notice her language is not good. She's too much the outsider? "No, let's put that straight. I'm not an outsider at all. I'm on every bloody A list there is in the art world and I'm on every A list in the f***ing fashion magazine world too. I go to all the parties."
And that makes her happy? "Of course it does. It's brilliant after the years I spent knocking on doors, scratching at them. But I've been on the scene a long time now and also I'm very entertaining, apart from when I'm ... but I haven't been obscenely drunk for a long time."
Ah yes, and how is the drinking going? She's pleased I ask since she hasn't had a drink since a half a glass of red on Friday night. She makes light of this triumph but it sounds to me as if, at 37, her drinking is no longer a joke. Her behaviour at a party last September, she assesses, was "atrociously bad, I mean outrageously bad". She fell over, smashed her face and split her lip. The next morning, she gave up spirits.
"I was horrified by what I had said and also, it was not incontinence exactly, but it was definitely extreme diarrhoea, just ridiculous. My weight dropped to something like seven and a half stone because every time I ate something it went straight through me. Then in January I had a really bad kidney infection and was in hospital for a week. I was on drips. It was horrible, frightening. Mat, my boyfriend, said he'd leave me if I ever drank spirits again and then my doctor says he'll leave me if I ever drink spirits again."
We agree this is, indeed, the moment to stop. This temperance tract turns out to be part of a generally conservative manifesto which also recommends getting up early, building a career, making money and buying houses. There are no short cuts, she says in special reference to the Chinese "performance artists" who held a pillow fight over My Bed last year. Her critics, her exlover Billy Childish among them, accuse her of being hung up on money and status but she says it is only right to champion success when it has been achieved by hard work.
The values she aspires to in what, in other circumstances, one would call her private life are just as old-fashioned. Without any embarrassment she says she is "in love" with her boyfriend, the artist Mat Collishaw, and was, before that, with Carl Freedman, the curator. She is violently against cheating in a relationship.
"I've been unfaithful once in my life. Twice, actually. I did it twice in one night."
I think that counts as once. "I don't, actually. Like, everyone can f*** once, but twice! You wanted to do it. I did it for my vanity."
She was brought up in Margate by her mother, Pamela Cashin, while her father, Envar, a Turkish-Cypriot chef and property developer, spent part of every week in London with his wife and other children. She wanted to be a virgin bride but that, she claims, was not an option in Margate. Sooner or later all teenage girls were "broken into". "It might not be like that in f***ing middle England, but in Margate it's only a matter of time. It's not called rape. It is not called losing your virginity. You got broke into."
She was raped, as we in middle England would say, when she was 13. "Germaine Greer got into terrible trouble for saying this but someone who is 18, who's been walking you home, that's been snogging you, then pushed you to the ground and forcibly puts themselves inside you and you cry and you didn't want it to happen and it's the first person you've ever had in your life, and you keep quiet about it - it's still actually somewhat different from, well, I'm not going to go into any violent scenarios, but you can imagine."
I am surprised that this is how she rationalises it, for the trauma undoubtedly changed her life. She barely attended school afterwards, kept clear of boys for six months and then "slept with just about everybody", a period of promiscuity that has repeatedly featured in her work. "I got a reputation not just of being a slag but of being a devious slag," she says, as if she thinks the reputation was deserved. Although the men were older, she had the higher intellect and should have known better.
So these were miserable years between 13 and 15? "No, they were great years, actually. It's funny you look back on when you thought you were terribly unhappy but you develop a hierarchy of what f***ing unhappy really is. Really unhappy is seeing your mum on a life-support machine and being told she might be dead in the morning." When did that happen? "Three years ago. She had a cyst which burst and burst her appendix. But she made a fantastic recovery."
The teenage Emin made it on to a fashion course at Medway College but under the influence of a charismatic boyfriend she now compares to Charles Manson (I'd like to say Billy Childish speaks highly of her, but he doesn't) she gave it up for an art degree in Maidstone. By the late Eighties she was studying at the Royal College of Art. In 1990, however, she hit a period that stays lodged high up her hierarchy of misery. It followed a particularly traumatic abortion, unexpected, because she had thought, having suffered gonorrhoea in her late teens, she was unable to conceive, and botched because she was carrying two babies, not one.
In 1992 she had another abortion. Between them, she had destroyed all the art she had made. "I didn't see the point of making anything, really. I thought the world was full of enough shit and crap without me adding to it, and, also, my feeling of being a failure, not only as an artist, but as a human being, was pretty intense. I was lonely, had no friends."
Her spirits revived when she met another young conceptual artist, Sarah Lucas - of Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab fame - and together they set up a shop selling the objects they made. At a party she ran into Jay Jopling and offered to write him a letter for £10. She duly sent him a harrowing account of an embryo sliding down her thigh. Jopling did the decent thing and signed her up.
The abortions, like her teenage rape, have featured in her books of autobiography, printed in limited edition so as to be artefacts in their own right. Even the aborted twins got named and appeared in the galaxy of names sewn into the roof of the tent, shown in the 1997 Royal Academy Sensation exhibition, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995. She now wishes she had made some of those names smaller. It has, apparently, given some people big heads. Otherwise, she has remarkably few regrets about making her life public.
She is accused of exhibitionism, but it is not that. She is "beautifully self-absorbed", as one old friend put it to me, but not vain: she'll remove her upper set of false teeth upon request or tell me that some days she has "really bad herpes" on her face. No, what has happened is that she has lost all concept of personal privacy, possibly because at an early age her mother told her she could do whatever she wanted as long as, in return, she told her everything. In an adult, such openness is extraordinary and dangerous, yet the secret to appreciating her work may be to ignore it and simply enter her world - or, in the case of Lord Saatchi's latest acquisition, her bedroom.
My Bed, she explains, is a stained, dishevelled re-creation of a period of deep depression (for some reason she won't say precisely when). Drinking but not eating, weighing less than seven stone, she remained beached there for five days before finally getting up. "Then I looked at that bed and I thought, 'Crikey!' There was almost a screen between me and it. At one point I was in the bed, part of all the decay and debris, and then I had this distance, the distance you have when you make a drawing. The one moment it's in your mind. The next minute it is on the paper. The bed is like that."
Once the bed became art she could walk away from her depression. It is a pretty good metaphor for Emin's entire career. Her art asks us to examine the messiness of her life, but frees her from it. The one-time "social terrorist", banned from parties, is now the talk of the town. The loner has enduring friends, a loving partner, a trusted dealer and, she believes, an artistic oeuvre that will survive the swing of the cultural pendulum away from the public confessional.
So good old Tracey, her art has saved her. An objection might be: why should we care? One answer is that her art, especially the embroidery work, is often decorative and pleasing in its own right. Another is that her telly outrages, her picaresque journey through the gossip columns and her ad campaigns (since she's off the hard stuff she asks me to say, for her sponsor's sake, that if she drank gin, Bombay Sapphire would be the gin she drank) have made a celebrity out of her - and this society is always keen to know about the private lives of celebrities. More importantly, her autobiography, as all good autobiography must, connects us to our common humanity.
"The whole thing about My Bed is that everyone has been there," she says. The gag is unintentional. "No, not in my bed! But everyone has been in that situation of depression to a certain extent. There comes a point in your life when you say, 'I can't. I can't get up.' And some people have never got up again, just gone to bed and died."
Tracey got up. As she did with the rest of her tousled life, she remade her bed and got rich, famous and happy, or happier, doing so. All told, it's another bum licking interview. Whether it is quite worth £150,000 is another matter.

The Vivienne Westwood
Posh Spice look