ABSTRACT
Goffman’s classic book Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity opens with a poignant letter written by a 16-year-old girl born with a congenital defect (Goffman, 1963). The letter, which had been sent to an ‘agony aunt’, expresses the writer’s sense of sadness, loneliness and personal hurt for herself and her family due to an abnormality causing a serious facial disfigurement. The letter ends in the young writer’s anguished plea, ‘Ought I to commit suicide?’
