In 1992, broke and desperate, she wrote letters to everyone she knew inviting them to invest £10 in her "creative potential." For the £80 she received in the first week—a small fortune at the time—she would write personal letters and sign them. Some of these missives were merely thank-you notes. Others went on for ten pages of confessional prose.

One respondent was the sculptor Sarah Lucas, with whom Emin opened the Shop, a storefront studio in which the two held all-night parties every Saturday for the eight months they stayed in business, and sold objects that they'd made there by hand. "Our idea of being professional," she says, "was twenty-four hours' fun."

Today her work carries handsome six-figure price tags and has made her wealthy enough to own not just the townhouse but a three-story, 8,000-square-foot building nearby that she is remaking into a four-story studio complex with a built-in pool. (She claims to swim ten miles a day.) She also has a second home in the south of France and a portfolio of real-estate investments. "I've never taken drugs," she volunteered, comparing herself to friends who put their money up their noses. "I bought property. I've even been lucky in this recession," she added. "I had the best January in sales I've ever had."

So she isn't suffering and she isn't dumb, but she has been criticized for the commercial instincts that earn admiration for her male counterparts. Perhaps it's the discomfort that her unabashed blend of sex and sentiment can generate. Like her life, her art is not a conceptualist puzzle that is difficult to parse—it's accessible to anyone, and that can make her seem less than serious. Take "Those Who Suffer Love," a rapid-fire video animation projected in a back room at Lehmann-Maupin: Produced from dozens of drawings (some exhibited on the gallery walls), it shows a faceless woman in a masturbatory frenzy. But the piece is less about sex than about the terrors of isolation, and is more hypnotizing than it is titillating.

Emin says she used a model for the work. "I wish it was me!" she allowed at the reading. "I rarely ever masturbate anymore and it pisses me off." But the piece still seems to refer to her own experience. On Sunday, she gave unflinching answers to written questions probing her attitude toward feminism, sex addiction, the afterlife, and the difference between men and women. "Women having sex come all the time," she said. "Men have one big ejaculation and it's over. It's the same in art. Male artists peak at 40 to 45. For women, it's about longevity."

Good thing her timing is perfect.