Imagine, if you will, the existential angst faced by Hunter S Thompson's publishers, paying an abuser of drugs and alcohol for the mad genius of his writing, knowing that those payments enabled him to buy more substances with which to abuse his brain (and write more publishable stuff). Recall the sombre critiques of book agents' moral imperatives to make sure the advances to clients such as Bret Easton Ellis weren't sniffed or smoked away. Pretend, for a moment, that the critical world concerned itself with the mental well-being and sobriety of writers great and small, preferring that they approach their subjects with a gimlet eye but never an actual gimlet.

Then, the opprobrium heaped on American blogger-cum-author Cat Marnell might be logically consistent. But, of course, it's not.

Marnell, for those who successfully avoided the cycle of who-we-all-hate-this-week on the internet, parlayed a mostly unheralded role at Lucky magazine to an impossible-to-ignore stint as a drugs and beauty writer at Jane Pratt's confessional blog xojane, to a gig writing about (among other things) drug use for the irrepressible Vice magazine, to a reported $500,000 memoir deal with Simon & Schuster.

She's barely 30, reputedly rarely sober, and unapologetically messy. She is, as one would have to be to get half a million dollars to write about a life statistically less than half over, also the self-professed progeny of a monied family, incredibly vulnerable-pretty, and possessed of the ability to write about all of that while holding the attention of both young women, jaded writers and editors far her senior.

Marnell makes no bones about her drug use. Her leaked book proposal goes even further, detailing everything from her unhappy upbringing to dangerously rough sex (despite early protestations that she disliked talking about her sex life), to a second-trimester abortion and more drug use and abuse than a Behind the Music episode on VH1. And instead of ending the book with a stint in rehab (she's reportedly done three) or a stable relationship with a supportive, staid guy (she's reportedly dating former Gawker editor AJ Daulerio, himself a recreational drug user), her redemption is … getting the book deal.

It's not what people were expecting.

Plenty of ink has been spilled exploring the morality of paying a reputed addict to write about addiction and the things they did in its thrall, especially when they appear less than contrite. Marnell, in particular, is the object of a lot of the new asked-for paternalism in publishing, even though she's well beyond the age of majority and knows how her addiction differentiates her from the sober masses. Yet, she's eminently readable, brutal in her own self-critique and perfectly aware that, as much as her socially acceptable beauty and her parents' money gives her an edge, it's the drugs and the messiness that make people read her.

There's the rub, though: people read because of the mess, not in spite of it. Her fans – and there are many – love the imperfection that depression and addiction give her beauty, seeing their own imperfect selves reflected in her despite the obvious advantages of her looks and her money. Her detractors believe, and rightly so, that her advantages glamorise her imperfections, and that were she less privileged, her depression and addiction would be far less attractive to fans or publishers.

And yet, both perspectives miss the salient point that, without the ability to write in a way that both connects and brutally alienates people, her life wouldn't be up for discussion at all. Her writing isn't accidental: she chooses to write about it, and keeps choosing to do so. And if she were a man, far fewer people would be decrying her supposed exploitation, or assuming that her story needs to end with a rebirth into bourgeois acceptability.

As it is, many people want to deny Marnell's agency. They want to say that addiction has robbed her of the ability to choose, even as it's apparently left her with the ability to write a 70-page book proposal that sold for $500,000. They want to blame her publishers for exploiting her addictions by publishing a book she clearly wants to write, and plenty of people clearly want to read.

Marnell once wrote: "It's OK to be a freak show. It makes you special and strange and valuable to the universe." We're the ones that want freak shows. True, many of us want to rubberneck at them to feel superior. But Marnell, on the other hand, is looking right back at us, with more than a little disdain.