TRACEY EMIN, the bad girl of Britart, has been accused by a former lover of wildly embellishing their sexual exploits in a new book about her life.

In the book Strangeland, Emin, 42, accuses an unnamed boyfriend of forcing her to indulge in exotic sexual practices that left her physically damaged. She also claims that the same man had an “unhealthy” interest in young girls.

Billy Childish, 46, a painter, poet, novelist and punk-rock musician, identified instantly with the man in the book who at one point looks into the mirror and impersonates the character Travis Bickle from the film Taxi Driver. This happened when the couple were lovers in the 1980s.

“He would stand in front of the mirror doing (Robert) De Niro impressions: ‘You talking to me?’,” writes Emin.

“That was me,” said Childish. “I treated her badly as a boyfriend because I was also seeing someone else. But I’m incapable of subjecting anyone to do anything. I am not aggressive, I am passive.”

This weekend the book is just outside the top 10 in The Sunday Times bestseller chart. Emin is in New York for an exhibition of her paintings entitled I Can Feel Your Smile.

It is not the first time she has been accused of rewriting the past to “glamorise” her image, often by pretending that things were worse than they were.

Although she studied at the Royal College of Art, she has destroyed most of the paintings she did there — they were in traditional style and earned compliments. She has tried to hide those that survive.

Emin has also exploited her reputation for earthiness in her art. She was nominated for the Turner prize in 1999 with her soiled, unmade bed surrounded by dirty knickers and condoms.

Strangeland, which has brought critical acclaim for an author who claims not to have read a book until she was 17, describes a love affair that started when she was 19 and lasted for three years. She claims that she was mentally and physically abused, but never kissed or held.

The artist writes: “The so-called man I was having a friendship with based his life on the films of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, books by Ernest Hemingway and Charles Bukowski.

“He never talked to me. But he bored me with a ceaseless diatribe of macho bullshit loosely based around generic rock’n’roll lyrics.”

Emin, who had been raped at the age of 13 in in her home town of Margate, Kent, adds: “He has an unhealthy penchant for young girls. I was 19, nihilistic and anorexic. Above all, I was incredibly weak and stupid to put up with him.”

However, it is Childish who claims that he is more of a victim. “I have gone from being thanked by her for my endless support at her early exhibitions to being some kind of Charles Manson figure,” he said.

He added that far from being anorexic, Emin was voluptuous when they met. “I distinctly remember her coming round to my mother’s house every Sunday for lunch and happily stuffing her face,” he said.

He says that the pair never lived together and that on occasions when he refused to sleep with her she accused him of being homosexual. He claims that she once told him to make love to her so roughly “that she wouldn’t be able to walk into college in the morning”. He denied having an unhealthy interest in young girls.

Childish, who founded the Stuckist group of painters opposed to Britart’s conceptual extremities, added: “My only explanation for Tracey’s errors of memory is her need to take over the identity of anyone she perceives as a victim and appropriate their feelings as her own.

“This brings her the sympathy and attention that she has always craved and would not receive if her complicity and aggression were known.”

Emin declined to comment on Childish’s claims.

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