The trailer for a new Britney Spears biopic features the inevitable buzz of an electric razor. It ploughs through the actor’s hair as if underlining something we might otherwise have missed. Hers was a story that became a fable, and the more times it is told, the further away she seems. The world loves to hear the tale of a woman wrecked. We listen with pity, our heads at an angle of precisely 30 degrees. It’s quite a different feeling to hear the story firsthand.

It is easier to watch a woman, especially one that’s beautiful, smudgy and in trouble, than to listen to her

Cat Marnell was a Condé Nast beauty editor and self-confessed junkie. She found an audience as an “unhealthy health writer” for the website xojane writing beauty posts titled things like: “I Loathe My Scary Dad, but I Love My Black Eyes: My Three Favorite Liners of All Time”, and then a sort of fame, when her haunting essay on Whitney Houston’s death (in which she explained why she writes about addiction) went viral. “You call it oversharing, I call it a life instinct. Because look. Look how easy it is, even when you are Whitney fucking Houston, to withdraw your voice and pretend like you’re a good girl and not mention that you’re using. To slip silently into the water. To disappear.”

Marnell left xojane in June 2012, upon returning from rehab. “Look,” she told the New York Post, “I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.”

News of her huge book deal was met with a sort of chuckling sympathy, and nobody in New York was surprised when she missed her deadline, spent the advance on drugs and overdosed a little bit on heroin. But then, after another burst in rehab, she produced How To Murder Your Life, an addiction memoir that was written on Adderall and a little coke. There is no redemption here; the happy endings are slight and knowing. Reading it is a bit like being inside a TV film, the part when you realise the call is coming from inside the house. This is a book written, if not quite during the dark night of the soul, then perhaps around 6am, when the commuter trains have started.

It’s not just this that makes it uncomfortable reading. The story spins on with moments of extreme boredom – sometimes it feels like you’re smoking it through a pipe. I groaned often, mostly at the lists of labels and gossipy italics, but it stayed with me. I talked about it a lot. I complained to my deskmate about Marnell’s relentless flipness. She holds no grudges, not against the parents who kept her medicated from childhood, or even against the men who robbed, raped and abused her. And then, of course, I’d dig back in, eyes narrowed.

Charles Bukowski wrote from within addiction, as did Hunter S Thompson. Men are allowed to have a thousand takes on drugs, but women, only one. And it’s not: “Here’s a life lesson for you, kids – it’s much easier to go through something upsetting when you’re on drugs.”

Marnell maintains that drugs have created her, made her personality and given her a career. Why is it hard to read her spiral, again and again? Why is it hard to read that she is writing with a pill bottle beside her? And why does her self-destruction elicit such glee and anger from readers and the press, commenters quick to point to her privilege, to insult her and her “enabling” editors? Is it because there’s more at stake for a woman, whose potential motherliness and sex appeal is always in the balance, that her story can only comfortably be told from the other side? Either through the filter of recovery, looking back, or by somebody else, a stranger with an editing suite?

It is easier to watch a woman, especially one that’s beautiful, smudgy and in trouble, than to listen to her. Marnell is no morality tale. Today she wears long bright wigs. Like Britney in the paparazzi days, Marnell has no hair, after she left a beauty product on her scalp too long and was left with chemical burns. She is not OK and she is not in control, and reading her book is disturbing and crucial, not just because of her lyrical honesty, but because while we relish the story of the trainwrecked woman, we rarely hear it narrated from the driver’s seat.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman