pathography

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pathography (plural pathographies)

A biography that highlights the negative aspects of its subject's life.
- [1988 August 28, Joyce Carol Oates, “Adventures in Abandonment”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
  Though this has been an era of magisterial biographies by such writers as Leon Edel, Richard Ellmann, Joseph Frank, Judith Thurman and Justin Kaplan, among others, it has also evolved a new subspecies of the genre to which the name "pathography" might usefully be given: hagiography's diminished and often prurient twin.]
- 2020 October 27, Daphne Merkin, “Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
  One would think there is little to be added, if only because of the avalanche of books — biographies, meta-biographies, pathographies (to borrow Joyce Carol Oates’s term), memoirs, critical studies, letters, journals, novels — that have been published about Plath since her suicide (which, for some people, is the only thing they know about her).
(medicine) A biography that explores the effects of a disease on its subject's life.

English