I made two large tapestries to hang in the main room of the house, showing key moments in Julie Cope's life. They're done in the style of Renaissance religious paintings, with the main characters shown several times in each image, in little vignettes marking different moments in time. The title of this one is a quote from the long poem I wrote, 'The Ballad of Julie Cope': 'Friends all agreed they were "a perfect match".' Julie had met Dave, her first husband, as a teenager when he was guitarist in a band called The Riders of Rohan that played the pubs on the Essex Marshes. He worked in the Coryton Refinery and was an aspirational young man; he soon became a foreman.

The red-roofed building is an old Essex pub with a clapperboard that says 'Band Tonight'. On the left is the little house where Julie was born, and there's her dad, Norman, breaking through the tiles in the roof, holding her aloft during their escape from the Great Flood of 1953. It was 1 February, the morning of Julie's birth. Her father was a very taciturn, quite kind of guy who'd been traumatised in the war.

The psychedelic arcs of colour suggest the idea of going back through time, like a sort of shifting lens. There's a reference to Elton John, Julie's favourite musician: that's why she called her son Daniel, after his hit song. On the right, there's Dave in his Ford Capri with Julie as a teenager, with their cassettes and cans of Tenants on the roof. And there are the landmarks of Basildon - modernist sculptures and 1960s tower blocks. In one of the arcs you can see Julie's mother losing her temper with her; she was quite a feisty kid.

I loved drawing all the detail of the clothes and shoes. At the right, Julie wears a Dr Feelgood T-shirt, a reference to the famous Canvey Island band. At the centre, it's 1974 and she's with her kids, Elaine and Daniel, sporting her sexy hippy-chick look: the disc belt comes straight from the 1970s and Daniel is wearing Clothkits dungarees that I copied out. The discarded doll is a reference to a line in the poem about how Julie's education lies untended along with an unloved doll behind the flowerbeds. Because of the sexism and class prejudice in that era, she wasn't encouraged to push herself as a student when she was at school, so she ends up as a secretary. That was very much my mother's biography as well: she was an intelligent woman who had no opportunity to really flourish.

By the 1970s, Julie and Dave had moved to South Woodham Ferrers, a big new development that I lived very close to when I was growing up. But all is not rosy - at the bottom left you can see the pink hairbrush of Pam, the 'other woman', and the bunch of flowers in Julie's hand with a message from Dave that reads: 'I am so sorry x D'

Grayson Perry