To Earps is human
No one stood to gain by protecting Mary from her fatal flaw.
On Halloween I watched The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode in which Homer sells his soul to the devil.
His price? A single donut.
What Mary Earps could earn by airing her dirty laundry in public is much more - or much less, depending on how you value the availability of a sweet treat at just the time you need it (in the event of a nuclear holocaust, you can't eat book royalties).
What makes this Simpsons story interesting is Homer's calculation that if he does not eat the whole donut, then his soul is safe - so he leaves one remaining morsel on a plate in the fridge surrounded by 'do not eat' warnings.
If you know Homer - or, indeed, the narrative bones of tragedy - you know what happens next.
In a moment of weakness, Homer scarfs Chekhov's crumb and hell descends.
Homer is watchable for the same reasons why Mary Earps has been grabbing headlines long before this debacle - because he is brilliant.
Cunning, wrapped in the guise of 'buffoon', with no impulse control.
It is human to know what will harm you but do it anyway.
Mary Earps' whole brand is 'authentiticity' and what is more real than the urge to write a whole book about the ways you feel you have been wronged?
She's living out our fantasies and bearing the horrid consequences, falling from hero to zero, losing the respect of many of the people whose hearts she won with her brilliance.
It's troubling, though, that everyone is talking about what a mean and nasty book that Earps has written before it has even been published. She hasn't written a whole book about Sarina Wiegman and Hannah Hampton - it's just that those were the most sellable extracts selected to preview it.
As a writer I struggle to 'sell' my work on social media as, to make it quickly digestible in short form, I have to strip away some of its value.
If the subjects of my writing didn't have the nuance to warrant 800 words, then I would just write a tweet and be done with it.
I'm not sure that reading Earps' book in full will remove the bad taste of the obnoxious excerpts which have been published to promote it, but I do believe I will find someone that I like amid passages about her experiences of bullying, a career as a professional goalkeeper and coming to terms with her sexuality.
It is difficult to remember that these are parts of her story, too, amid all the noise about one ugly one. I am somewhat playing devil's advocate, since I am inclined to agree with the verdict of Luke Edwards of the Telegraph: "Her ego is out of control."
But I also agree with what Earps told the BBC: "Multiple things can be true at the same time".
The interview reveals Earps for who she is: eloquent, intelligent, self-aware.
None of that is evident in the nauseating preview extracts which were selected (presumably) by a publisher who will profit from a Christmas boom of book sales. This, another kind of cunning wrapped in idiocy - calculated and mercenary. Scandal sells and no one stood to gain by protecting Mary from her fatal flaw, her refusal to be anyone but herself.
It was an open goal for those media outlets who are skilled at twisting people's words to inflame the kind of debate that sells papers - this time, they didn't have to do anything at all. Copy, paste, publish.
I can't blame Edwards, because he is telling it as he sees it.
But the fact that he is just one of so many that have come down so hard on Earps shows how little space for nuance there is in mainstream media at the moment.