Tracey Emin's alternative Christmas

No matter how much we know about Tracey Emin growing up in Margate, her turbulent adolescence, her limited schooling – she left aged 13 but was forced to return at 15 – and the 'genius clause' that secured her a place at Maidstone College of Art, despite her lack of qualifications, where she gained a first-class degree, it is still a surprise to learn that she grew up in a house without books. Here she is, poised and nonchalant, posing for the camera in front of her curated shelf in the Louis Vuitton Librairie, at the glamorous LV Maison at 17-20 New Bond Street. Behind her sit the books that have most influenced her: the authors range from Anaïs Nin to AA Milne, Nabokov to Lynne Barber, and subjects leap from

The Louis Vuitton Librairie is an ongoing project in which artists are invited to display their favourite books – Gary Hume, Marc Quinn and Chris Ofili have already taken part and Grayson Perry is next. But Louis Vuitton has a particularly close relationship with Tracey. It is a main sponsor of her forthcoming retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in May 2011; she has shown at the label's gallery in Paris and was part of its artists' talks programme in London two years ago –a far cry from the cultural privations of her childhood.

Tracey read her first book, or half of it to be precise, aged 13. It was a Mills & Boon. She thought it was dreadful and wanted to review it for a competition at WHSmith but her school said no, her English was too poor. She sent in a review anyway and came second. The next book she read, aged 17, was David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon, which is on her shelf. 'I laughed so much, I wrote to David Niven to tell him. Then I read a load of Hollywood books, about Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra. I did the Rat Pack. When I got on to Cecil B DeMille I realised I was in a whole new realm, understanding that Hollywood had its own structure and wasn't run by the stars. I read a book a week until I was 26.' She later devoured Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, which was 'brilliant and really shocking'.

Tracey's confidence as a reader grew from passion, she says. 'I remember being 20, reading Crime and Punishment at the same time as my friend Maria Tantoni and my [then] boyfriend, the artist Billy Childish.' Tracey famously accused Childish of being 'stuck' in his art and he went on to found the anti-contemporary 'Stuckist' art movement which protests outside the Turner Prize every year. 'We had two copies between three of us – we couldn't afford to buy another – and were all reading it at the same time. One copy stayed in the flat we shared and the other would go to art school with one of us. We would rush home and fight over the books. If the others got ahead, it was agony. The more we read, the more gripping it got. It's one of my happiest reading memories.'

A more recent discovery is Daphne du Maurier: 'My Cousin Rachel is so cruel, so chilling. People think Du Maurier is wanky romance for bored ladies; it's not, it's incred-ibly dark. But it can be read as a romance, it's up to the reader.' That sounds like a lot of Tracey's own work: pretty, domesticated, but with a dark underbelly that some people choose not to see. 'Yes, I've been criticised for being too cute, too superficial, but that is people not wanting to look.'

Her installation My Bed, covered in stains and surrounded by condoms, ashtrays, empty bottles and dirty knickers, that just failed to win the Turner Prize in 1999, was far from cute but it was certainly domestic. It came from the same emotional source as her beautifully crafted quilts whose sewn-on words discuss sex, life, death, racism and alcohol, and the bronze sculpture of an abandoned baby's sock she placed on the steps to the British Pavilion when she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007. I was not the only person who thought that sock was one of the best things at the
Biennale, a brutally innocent object resonant with references to Tracey's unexpected birth 47 years ago as the undetected and undersized twin of her more substantial brother Paul (their absent father, Enver Emin, a Turkish Cypriot who fathered an estimated 23 children and seduced Tracey's mother when they were both married to other people, spent three days a week with Tracey, Paul and their mother, three days with his other family and one day 'somewhere else, we never knew where'); her two abortions, the first of which left her very ill and the second of which was twins – the smaller foetus was missed and slid down her leg in the street a few days later; the sexual abuse she endured as a child by a man she refuses to name; her rape by a local youth in Margate aged 13; and the fact that she will never be a mother. It also touched the sense of abandonment we all carry inside us in one way or another, because her work is both self-referential and universal; it is honest.

Do Not Abandon Me is the title of Tracey's most recent show, a collaboration with Louise Bourgeois that opened in New York in October and comes to London in the new year. The catalogue sits in pride of place on her curated shelf and she tells me about meeting Bourgeois, the artist whose monumental spider sculpture, Maman, inaugurated Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2000, and who died this year aged 99. 'I first visited her five years ago and I thought she was formidable. I thought she didn't like me. She asked how long I'd been coming to New York and when I said 11 years, she shouted at me, asking why I'd never visited before. And she shouted in French because it was her first language.'

It turned out Bourgeois liked Tracey very much, especially her writing, including a piece Tracey had written about Bourgeois for Parkett magazine, and they began a conversation that continued until Bourgeois' death, meeting every six months or so. They found they had a huge amount in common. 'A lot of people put me down because I talk about what I know, my personal life, my intimate experiences and feelings, but that's my art language and that was her language, too. In terms of self-analysis, it's a journey, an adventure of the mind, finding out about yourself.'

The collaboration was Louise's idea – Tracey says she wouldn't have presumed to ask – and when Bourgeois sent her 'a huge roll' of images to work on, Tracey waited 18 months before her mind was clear enough to begin. She had five exhibitions to work on first and carried the prints with her as she travelled the world from show to show. Finally, she began to overlay Bourgeois' paintings of male and female torsos, heavily pregnant or hugely phallic, with tiny figures that occupy wombs, climb, suck or appear to worship male appendages and, in one case, is crucified on a phallus. Bourgeois saw the work in March and approved it just months before she died. Tracey was shocked by the loss. 'I was sure she'd live to reach 101. It was the week after my father died, aged 89, and I was alone in my house in France when I got the call about
Louise. I always thought they'd have made a good couple. It's weird to carry on with the show without her.'

Much of their conversation was of wombs, pregnancy and childbirth, but a difference between the two artists was that Bourgeois had three children. 'You see the future and you're alone, holding your cat's paw, it's a different place you're going to,' says Tracey, with more than a hint of self-mockery. But not having children is a complex issue for her. 'If I'd wanted them, I suppose I'd have had them,' she says. 'But I never met a man who wanted to have them with me, so that wasn't encouraging, and now I'm too old. Last year I had an operation to prevent pregnancy, to remove the possibility. The idea of getting pregnant at 47 – I'd be grandmother-age bringing up a child. But I don't think I was meant to have them. When a friend gives me one to hold I feel like I'm holding an alien. My friend [and Spitalfields neighbour] Samantha Morton had a baby and I didn't see her for two months. But when she said they had got some kittens I was round like a shot.'

Still, one feels that Tracey is in a constant state of mourning. Her studio is littered with small chairs which, she says, belong to 'all my dead children', referring as much, I think, to dreamed-of babies as to the abortions. Her relationships are long-term and serious; she doesn't do casual. She went out with the writer, curator and gallery owner Carl Freedman from 1993 to 1996 ('We had a clause that we renewed our relationship every six months, we never took it for granted and we're still very good friends'), fellow YBA Mat Collishaw from 1997 to 2002 and photographer Scott Douglas from 2006 to 2010.

Tracey's problem with Christmas is that 'for people with children it is utterly child-centred', and she wishes she knew more childless women. But she manages to find enough waifs and strays to make a party on Christmas Eve at her Huguenot house off Brick Lane, in which the basement kitchen is dominated by a long wooden table with a miniature Nativity scene on it –'from Austria; I go there every January to read and detox' – and each room is painted in 17th-century colours and furnished with carefully sourced antiques. And she has Docket, a cat given to her a decade ago by Mat Collishaw, who is now in a relationship with the taxidermy artist Polly Morgan. 'A docket is what you get before you get your ticket: Docket was my pre-child instruction manual. Now, of course, he is my child.' She laughs. 'For Christmas Eve, I cook chicken soup and vegetable soup, buy big cheeses, and text invitations to friends who I know are on their own. People are usually invited somewhere on Christmas Day or are going away to escape, so Christmas Eve is a good one. Sometimes it's ten people, sometimes 30. I decorate the house with fairy lights and candles and it's quite secular, but we do go to Midnight Mass. A couple of years ago I decorated the church and hired candelabras. When we arrive, it's a bit like Stella Street, neighbours turning round in their pews saying, "That really looks like Bianca Jagger!" Last time, Bianca and Vivienne [Westwood] heckled the vicar because they didn't agree with what he was saying. And I was so drunk I started miaowing during the Amens. But it's nice, not about presents or money, but doing something together.'

This year Tracey's mother Pam, 82, is spending Christmas with her. 'The reason I've never liked Christmas is because my mum used to waitress on Christmas Day and Paul and I sat at home waiting for her. We didn't have decorations, our house wasn't Christmassy. My mum didn't like it because my dad was never with us, he was with his wife and their children. She's always refused to come to mine. I think she agreed this year because I told her I missed her when I was in hospital.' Tracey broke three ribs in October after falling down the steep flight of stairs that leads to her attic bedroom. She had spent a relatively sober evening with friends at a restaurant. Luckily her friend Joe, who lives in the cottage at the bottom of her garden, found her. Tracey's mother lives in a flat near Margate that the artist bought for her, and Tracey is clearly thrilled to have her to stay: 'I'm taking her bowling at Shoreditch House.'