We are all self obsessed, none more so than Dame Tracy.

To have risen to a place of great fame and position in the British establishment by endlessly painting her own vulva is really quite an achievement.

She is, apparently, regarded as one of the most significant and influential artists of her generation.

I am all in favour of art speaking loudly, and Ms Emin certainly does that. Were I to attempt to emulate Tracy in putting my pain into art, my style would be that of Munch and his Scream.

If Ms Emin seeks to shock, she certainly succeeds. But her greater achievement is to portray life in all its vileness through the lens of the daughter of a less privileged family from a dismal seaside town on Britain’s south coast. Destitute is probably a better description of her family’s state – following the collapse of her father’s hotel, her mother was left alone to bring up two young children in extreme poverty.

Margate, I used to think, has its charms.  The funfair, a beautiful beach, delightful and outdated seaside cafes. But as a son of a wealthy middle class family which at that date seemed to lack for nothing, it is hardly surprising that I saw a different side of the place.

While I have never lacked money, suffering is not something I have managed to escape. It’s just that I have never been able to describe it as efficiently or brutally as Ms Emin. Nor have I been able to turn it into great art or great wealth.

I can see that what she has achieved is in many senses wholly admirable. She has pulled herself up by her own bootstraps by expressing her grim suffering.  Her art exposes vulnerability and raw psychological truth, allowing viewers to connect deep emotional resonance to her work. She shows a life of poverty, sexual abuse, heavy drinking and severe illness.

I think part of art’s remit is to shock. To tell how life really is.  My own temptation has always been to run: Tracy’s is to stand firm and shout loud about just how grim her life has been.  And for that I salute her.

Do I “like” her art? I do not. Do I like her story? I do not. Do I admire her: I do.

I sat halfway through her exhibition at the Tate Modern in front of another wall full of her body, sometimes mounted by that of some British youth, sometimes not.  I had passed her bed and taken in the empty vodka bottles and other detritus and by now I could take no more.

She had done her job. I got the picture. Her job is art, and if art’s job is to show human life as it is for so many, she has done it exceptionally well.

She is not a comfortable subject, nor is her work.

But bravo Tracy. You have survived, you have won through. So many do not.