It's like passing the scene of a car crash. The brazen ghoul slows to crawling speed and does all but park and pick over the remains. The rest of us tut-tut at the ghoul, while having a good gawp for ourselves. We know we shouldn't, but we do it anyway.

The life and death of Paula Yates was like that. We stared and forgave ourselves for staring because, well, hadn't she accepted that Faustian deal invariably trotted out to explain away even the grossest media violations? - that once she had "used" them to make her name or get across her side of the story, every particle of her life was fair game?

Muriel Gray described this week being in a room with her in the early 1980s when Paula, then heavily pregnant with Fifi, read a piece in New Musical Express that suggested it would be best for the world if she aborted Bob Geldof's child: "I haven't the stomach to relate the effect."

This week the tabloid columnists were out in force, the ones who are paid to chronicle every "incoherent", "dishevelled", "red-eyed", "stumbling", sighting of every minor soap star with cocaine-rotted noses and television "personality" whose child is having a nervous breakdown.

If you had the stomach you could have read, say, Dominic Mohan, the Sun's Showbiz editor: "I urged her: `retreat somewhere quiet, relax and gather your thoughts. I don't want to be writing another story about . . . a suicide attempt . . .'," - all written as if some supernatural forces beyond his control compelled him to log, for public edification, the disintegration of a grievously ill, middle-aged mother of four and file it under "showbiz".

Much of the coverage focused on her desperate need for fame, on her facility for reinventing herself, the conviction that hers was a tragedy waiting to happen.

Some peddled the tiresome old chestnut of the free-thinking, ladette-before-her-time - whereby she "subliminally" instructed all women that "basically you could do what the bloody hell you liked" - only to be punished by a misogynistic media for daring to be her own master. Memorable examples of this free-thinking behaviour included asking Mick Jagger on The Tube (the early 1980s pop programme that made her name): "What have you got down the front of your pants?"

Sure, she made her own choices. But to what extent were those "choices" real, once shaped by a childhood starved of love or any semblance of security? Her cringingly intimate 1995 autobiography and an Observer interview with her batty mother a couple of months ago, alone were enough to confirm that Paula's notorious craving for "celebrity" was not the impulse of an airhead, but the lifelong yearning of a tiny, love-starved child.

She was unquestionably a clever, determined woman. Soon after her autobiography appeared and was being generally trashed, the very cultured director of a serious London publishing house who had just met her, told me that he had liked her enormously: "I found her to be an extremely witty and original thinker."

But why would such a woman parlay those gifts into packaging herself as that male fantasy, the rock chick who loved it? "In truth," wrote Yvonne Roberts in the Guardian, "what she cultivated was a peculiarly British dated chauvinist image; the blonde bimbo with breasts who acts dead saucy; a junior Barbara Windsor."

When her death was announced, snippets of her autobiography about her early life suddenly took on new meaning: "I had a boyfriend, some cash, a bag of drugs . . . I felt careless, organic and sexy. I was 12."

About the man she believed to be her father (Jess Yates, the Stars on Sunday presenter who was caught on holiday with a 16-year-old and had to be smuggled out of the BBC in the boot of a car): a manic depressive who used to lock her in a box and spend all night playing his Wurlitzer organ for her, stopping now and then to tend his septic leg wound, incurred after he (purposely) sliced it with the lid of a cat-food tin.

About her mother (author of the recent book Cat Chat, about cats): "I used to pine like a dog for my mother . . . When she finally came home, I would lie prone outside the toilet door in case she tried to escape through the window."

Over the top? To this day, her mother, the 62-year-old Helene Thornton (nee Elaine Smith, Blackpool beauty queen, aka Heller Toren, bit-part actress and author of torrid novels), comes across like a creature from a parallel universe.

Helene's father was a Blackpool policeman; her mother took Mandrax "and slept seven-eighths of the day". Not nearly interesting enough, however, for her. So she claims to have discovered at 36 that her real father was a Frenchman, with "the presence of an emperor, you know". Approached many years later by this "very stylish gentleman" to have lunch with her, she agreed. But it was not to be. Because he died two weeks later.

And could she explain at all how it happened that Paula's real father turned out, upon DNA testing, to be Hughie Opportunity Knocks Green? Some sinister meddling with the DNA test, she suggests . . . or maybe it was Hughie Green that night touching her right shoulder, when she woke up to find Jess snoring on her left. The important thing in any event, is that she was the innocent party: "I'm supposed to take the blame for absolutely everything."

When this interview took place, Paula had not been in touch for five years: "I can't make her want to see me again. I always hope that she'll stop this need to play Orphan Annie."

And her analysis of Paula's aching neediness, her chronic lack of self-esteem? "Famous people want to be, very often, somebody else. Paula, from a tiny child, always wanted to be famous. Jess always wanted to be famous. Jess Yates, BBC. Paula Yates, Famous Person. I wanted to be me . . . There are rocklike personalities who are sure of their own beliefs and and their own selves, and there are those who need the accolade of celebrity. I see celebrity as something terrible."

So, absolutely nothing to do with her, then, even if Paula herself acknowledged her exhibitionism was part of a desperate strategy to overcome childhood rejection.

But her mother is right about the celebrity. We know far more about Paula Yates than is decent. We disdain the details and the media that carry them but lap them up none the less, however insignificant, vulnerable and fragile the "personality" or their extended family. So much the better if it features a slow-motion ride to disintegration and death and the script includes a small child who finds the body.

Perhaps the one truism highlighted by this entire tragedy is that no, you basically can't do whatever the hell you like. For every action there is a consequence - in this case, one little orphaned girl and three more children left without a mother.

What further grief is being stored for succeeding generations?