Read all about me - Kerry Katona

How much do you know about Kerry Katona's personal problems? Probably more than you need to. But how else can fading stars stay in the spotlight, asks Alice Wyllie

REHAB, child custody battles, drugs, alcohol, criminal charges: just a few of the ingredients that make a celebrity story truly compelling. Forget the happy-ever-after – it just doesn't sell. So obsessed have we become with the minutiae of stars' lives that, for some, no detail is considered too sordid when a publishing tell-all deal is dangled in front of them.

Former glamour model Katie Price regularly "shares" about her marriage, her sex life and the challenges of raising a disabled child. Big Brother contestants stare po-faced from the pages of red-tops, throwing out titbits about their eating disorder/substance addiction/lovers. But over and above all of these reigns the current grande dame of misery-mag fodder: Kerry Katona.

For those unfamiliar with 27-year-old Katona, she enjoyed success with girl band Atomic Kitten in the late 1990s, but since 2001 has carved out a career as a self-sabotaging seeker of the limelight. Be it her drug abuse, her child-custody battle or her sad upbringing, no private matter is so private that she won't share it with the readers of Heat.

Katona has had a turbulent life, eventful enough to keep gossip fans enthralled. The latest tale of woe concerns her mother, Susan Katona, 48, who yesterday failed to appear in court (owing to agoraphobia, it was stated), having been accused of making fraudulent benefit claims. It was alleged an overpayment was made to her when Mrs Katona failed to declare income from supplying photos for her daughter's autobiography.

Katona's relationship with her mother is the stuff of legend. Claiming that her earliest memory is of her mother's attempted suicide, Katona says she was an habitual alcohol and drug abuser with several violent boyfriends. Katona was taken into care and raised by foster parents.

She left school at 16, working as a stripper and dancer before finding fame with Atomic Kitten in 1999. Since leaving the band for her first pregnancy, she has married and divorced Westlife singer Brian McFadden (with whom she had two daughters) and remarried taxi driver Mark Croft, with whom she has a son and a daughter.

In 2004 she won the reality TV show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! thanks to her down-to-earth personality, and the public has enjoyed a love/hate relationship with her ever since. Today she lives off magazine deals, a reality TV show, Crazy in Love, and an advertising deal with Iceland frozen foods, which was renewed in May for a reported £250,000.

The past few years have been peppered with depression, drug abuse and legal disputes with McFadden. She was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has faced public condemnation for smoking while pregnant. In September 2007 she was voted the second worst celebrity mother in a poll – after being hailed celebrity mum of the year in 2002 and 2005 – and has also been named most irritating individual and the fourth most hated person in Britain.

She recently told Closer magazine: "I want people to like me, that's all. It's made me lose my confidence. I do feel victimised. At least it keeps me in the public eye."

Is her life in the spotlight a symptom of her determination to escape an appalling childhood? Is she famous in spite of the obstacles she has faced, or is it those obstacles that have helped an otherwise mediocre woman find fame, thanks to our perverse delight in her personal woes?

There certainly exists a morbid fascination with the sad lives of certain (usually female) celebrities. Magazines have spent so long promoting an enviable, airbrushed lifestyle, we now enjoy reading that – despite the wealth and fame – we're actually a lot better off than they are.

The sad downfall of Britney Spears has become everyone's business, while we're updated almost hourly on the travails of Amy Winehouse. Kerry Katona has become the poster girl for this tragic genre. Would she still interest us without so many sad tales to tell? Probably not. However, she's clearly hit on a way of securing her future.

If magazines are willing to pay her to talk about her life, should she be criticised for accepting, or is it those who buy the magazines, handing over cash in order to mock her, that are the real fools?