My idea was to use Marnell as a jumping-off point for an essay about confessional writing online, a subject of fascination for me, because I write and edit personal essays for Salon. These stories are often difficult and sometimes breathtakingly candid: one I edited was written by a teacher fired for her prostitute past; another was by a woman who gave birth to a stillborn child and took him home for a short time.

I, too, had been wrestling with a maybe-memoir-thing about my own drinking — all of which means I’d been thinking about the potholes of addiction and autobiography more than most. I was interested in the masochism of self-disclosure: how punishing it could be to write about yourself in the age of Internet comments and snarky blogs. Yet people like Cat Marnell still stepped up to their computers and happily popped open a vein.

Her prose also had energy. Her best articles — like the one about taking pills during fashion week — displayed a willingness to tell unflattering truths about herself that reminded me of Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of “Prozac Nation.” And Marnell did it all without a net — no editor marking up an early draft, no copy editor using a red pen to flag misspellings before the article went live. The age of instant self-publishing has left so many young writers sitting in the swill of their own typos and bad ideas — although many of Marnell’s ideas were quite good. She understood that writing about a tired subject like beauty products (her official beat) required creative framing. She understood the Internet was crazy, and so you had to be a little bit crazier to get some heat. My favorite Cat Marnell headline: “I Loathe My Scary Dad but I Love My Black Eyes: My Three Favorite Liners of All Time.” It’s about how her shrink father put her on Adderall when she was a teenager, which she said led her to become a pillhead. It then segued into an instructional on how get her smudge-eyed look. I hated that story and adored it in equal measure.

Her readers often feel the same way. Comments sections on her articles have ballooned to 900 responses, a battleground of haters vs. fangirls with too much leisure time and too many exclamation points. I could spend hours watching the pitchforks fly. It must have given her a gratifying sense of infamy to be the most interesting writer on a site, even if it was a site most people had never heard of. If attention is a drug, she was hooked up to an IV drip.

I would get these funny zaps of envy reading her prose. I should have done more drugs, I would stupidly think. I should have fallen deeper in the hole. I was just a garden-variety lush, so enamored of booze I didn’t even bother with hard drugs. And I saw in her drug use and her writing an abandon I never allowed myself, and it gave her articles that unmistakable thrill of things breaking apart.

But I was concerned about her too. She seemed very alone in the world, even as she bragged to me about graffiti artists and friends crashing on a mattress on the floor. She talked about never having been in love. She talked about being estranged from her family. She took that post about her father down, her one real regret in a long history of potential overshares. “I don’t need to sell that out to get traffic,” she told me. “You’ll never see me writing about my family online again.”

Every personal-essay writer struggles with this line, and I don’t know one of us who hasn’t bungled it big time. I tried to protect the writers I worked with. On other first-person sites — sites where I flattered myself that the editors weren’t as careful as I was — I saw too much exposure. I would find myself excising the grimmest parts of personal essays, torn between my desire to protect the human being and my knowledge that such unforgettable detail would boost a story’s click-through rate.