Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting

Abstract

The word “pathography” first caught my attention not in its clinical context, in which it simply refers to writing about illness, such as case histories, but in a review by Joyce Carol Oates of David Roberts’s recent biography of Jean Stafford. There Oates adapted the clinical term to denote—and to denigrate—what she described as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin, [whose] motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct” (3). According to Oates—not entirely a disinterested party, since, as a famous writer, she is sure to be a biographer’s subject eventually—we are in the midst of an outbreak of diseased biography that dwells obsessively on its subjects’ (psycho)pathology.