One year ago, coverage of Anna Nicole’s death tended to go in one of two directions. Either she was memorialized as a breathtaking beauty who was little more than a victim of a cruel culture, or she was mocked for having made one laugably bad life choice after another.

These two views stem from opposing interpretations of her life and death. Was she a victim of a culture in which her only hope of social mobility was leveraging her sex appeal for fame and money and then leveraging that fame once the sex appeal and money ran out? Or was she just an idiot who simply made bad choice after bad choice? If her rise and fall is structural, we are all to blame; if its due to her own agency, then we owe her nothing but scorn.