ABSTRACT
In Recovering Bodies, Tom Couser (1997) coined the term “autopathography” to categorize autobiographical narratives of illness or disability. The book explored illness narrative as life writing and its potential to engage contemporary politics of the body and to represent an entire life “to the degree that the writer identifies the self with the body” (14). Recovering Bodies devoted considerable attention to subjectivity on conditions that “have been […] particularly stigmatizing or marginalizing” (15), although mental illness narratives were omitted, partly because “dysfunctions like schizophrenia and depression raise complex and largely independent issues—such as the representations of altered consciousness—that [Couser] was ill-equipped to address” (17).
