Life's Pleasures Quote by Tracey Emin

Emin’s line lands because it weaponizes confession and then immediately turns it into a dare. The first clause is the kind of mea culpa you expect from a culture that loves redemption arcs; the second clause blows up that expectation with a brag so naked it becomes comedy. “Hardly any” and then “ever, ever” is a wonderfully human slip: she can’t resist tightening the story into a myth of control, even as the audience can hear the exaggeration creak. The quote performs the very thing it denies - messiness - but channels it through precision.

The subtext is less about alcohol than authorship. Emin has spent her career making public the stuff polite society wants edited out: sex, shame, self-sabotage, longing. Here, drunkenness becomes a convenient scapegoat, a narrative container that lets you admit catastrophe without surrendering agency. She’s not asking for pity; she’s reasserting sovereignty over her own legend. If the “mistakes” happened drunk, then sober Emin is the competent curator, the one still holding the pen.

In the context of confessional art and tabloid-era moralizing, the line is a refusal to be flattened into either saint or wreck. It also pokes at how we police women’s unruliness: the public can tolerate excess if it’s framed as impairment, not intent. Emin’s wink is that the intent was always there; intoxication just made it harder for everyone else to pretend otherwise.