1
The
Obituary of a Face: Lucy Grealy, Death Writing and Posthumous Harm
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab001oa
G. ThomasCouser
Hofstra University, USA, enggtc@hofstra.edu
Address
for correspondence: G. Thomas Couser, Department of English, Hofstra University,
Hempstead, NY 11549-1000, USA; Email: enggtc@hofstra.edu
On 12 December 2002, the
New York Times published an obituary of Lucy Grealy: `Lucy Grealy, 39,
who wrote a memoir on her disfigurement'. Without saying so directly, the
obituary implied that Grealy committed suicide because of continued, or increasing,
unhappiness about her disfigurement. It is hard to imagine an obituary more
at odds with the book that made her famous (and thus earned her a New
York Times obituary), The autobiography of a face. In her memoir
Grealy chronicles a lifelong struggle to accept her face. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's
obituary reconstructs her life in terms of the tritest script of disability
- that of triumph over adversity - and then characterizes its ending as a
tragic reversal of that presumed triumph.
Although it is rarely discussed as a significant form of life writing,
the obituary is probably the genre most familiar to and most commonly consumed
by the public. As such it is worthy of attention, and its implications are
perhaps most interesting when it both depends on, and departs from, the self-written
life of its subject, as this one does. Joel Feinberg's theory of posthumous
harm holds that, although it may be impossible (in some sense) to harm the
dead since the dead are no longer persons/subjects, it is possible to harm
their surviving interests. If one accepts Feinberg's argument, then Lucy Grealy's
obituary can be seen as a particularly ironic example of death writing inflicting
posthumous harm on its subject.
On
12 December 2002, the New York Times, often described as the `newspaper of
record', published an obituary under the following headline: `Lucy Grealy,
39, who wrote a memoir on her disfigure- ment.' Needless to say, those of
us who had read and like~ and in my case, taugh~ that memoir, Autobiography
of a face, were shocked and saddened to hear of its author's early death.
Grealy was a minor literary celebrity, and the unanticipated death of any
celebrity arouses curiosity about its circumstances and cause. On this
2
matter,
the obituary's author, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, was at once circumspect
and irresponsible. While declining to specify a cause of death, the obituary
presented its circumstances in a sequence of sentences that implied one: Lucy
Grealy, the poet and essayist who wrote a noted 1994 memoir, Autobiography
of a face, about her experience growing up with extreme facial disfigurement
and repeated surgery to repair it, died at a friend' s house in Manhattan....
No cause of death was announced. Friends said she had been despondent over
operations she underwent two years ago. (2003: B7) I think that many, if not
most, readers of this short passage would infer that Grealy committed suicide
and did so because of continued, or increasing, unhappiness about her appearance.
To put it crudely, many would conclude that she killed herself because she
thought she was ugly. According to Alden Whitman, chief obituary writer for
the New York Times in the 1960s and 1970s, `a good obituary should not be
a partisan document.... [rather] it ought to be as dispassionate and as many-sided
as possible' (1971: 9). Historian Janice Hume characterizes the obituary in
different but related terms, suggesting that it needs to balance two functions:
chronicling and commemorat- ing (2000: 14). By either set of standards, the
Grealy obituary is de- ficient. While it is not `partisan', it is hardly many-sided,
and it chronicles at the expense of memorializing. Its main offence is to
in- sinuate what it seems unwilling to state (that Grealy killed herself)
and, further, to imply what could not be known (even had Grealy left a suicide
note); namely, the reason or motive for the (implied) suicide. If Grealy died,
as was rumoured, of a drug overdose, without leaving a suicide note, the obituary
seems all the more irresponsible because of the inherently ambiguous nature
of such a death.1 Although the writer's intention may have been to protect
Grealy's reputation from the scandal of death from a self-administered drug
overdose, the obituary errs by inscribing its own very questionable interpretation
of her death. It at once withholds and interprets facts about her death, replacing
the stigma of illegal drug use with that of suicide. It is thus not only bad
journalis~ to the extent that it does not con- fine itself to the known facts; it is also bad life writing. Indeed, in my view the obituary is particularly
insidious because it is the obituary of a memoirist. I shall argue that, by
overwriting her memoir, it margin- alizes her even as it memorializes her.
An accomplished writer who published poems and a book of essays, Grealy was
best known for her memoir; it is doubtful that she would have been considered
worthy of a New York Times
3
obituary
had she not published Autobiography of a face, which gained her a large audience.
(Indeed, the obituary's identifying clause, `who wrote a memoir on her disfigurement',
concedes that.) Grealy's dis- figurement was undeniably central to her identity
and her life cours ~s her memoir's striking title declare but the thrust of
her book, as I read it, was that she had begun to understand that her real
life would not, as she had long believed, commence when her face was `fixed'
but rather that her fate was to live with a face that surgery could alter
but never normalize. Lehmann-Haupt's obituary over- writes her literally painstaking
self-representation in two distinct but related ways; its brief narrative
of her life reconstructs it in terms of the tritest script of disabilit that
of victory over adversit and then characterizes its ending as a tragic reversal
of her presumed tri- umph. It suggests, then, that her reconciliation with
her face was in the end transitory, if not illusory. Debra Taylor observes
that `despite the fact that the obituary is such a vital component of the
modern newspaper, it is not a highly valued form of journalism' (2001: 668).2
And precisely because it is seen as mere `journalism~ at least in the US~
it is infrequently regarded as a significant form of biography. Yet the obituary
is undoubtedly the most widely disseminated life-writing genre and thus the
one most widely consumed by the general public. (According to Alden Whitman,
`the obit page is the most widely read in most news- papers' (1971: 8).) I
confess that, although I check the New York Times obituaries daily, I gave
very little thought to the obituary as a form of life writing until recently.
Such a popular genre is surely worthy of sustained critical attention. (It
does get an entry in the Encyclopedia of life writing, but the bibliography
is rather short, sug- gesting that the obituary has not received its due from
scholars and critics (Taylor, 2001: 668).) Indeed, insofar as it is presumably
univer- sal among print cultures, it would seem ripe with potential for cross-
cultural analysis. In any case, its implications are thrown into high relief
when an obituary both depends on, and departs from, the self-written life
of its subject, as Grealy's does. I would not argue that autobiographers should
be privileged sub- jects of obituaries. Indeed, I would not claim that obituaries
should defer to their subjects' desires, no matter who those subjects are.
In the USA a sharp distinction is made between the obituary `proper' and the
`death notice'. Death notices are generally quite short; they are written
and paid for by friends or relatives of their subjects, who typically do not
merit obituaries; they are thus not journalism but a form of eulogy. In contrast,
obituaries are news, the first draft of history; they are written by professional
journalists employed by
4
newspapers
or news agencies. Interestingly, this distinction is not observed in the UK:
according to the American critic Elaine Showalter. American obituary writing
... remains primarily a news item rather than an aspect of belles lettres.
Lapses of days or even weeks between a death and an obituary are routine in
the UK, while in the USA, time- liness is all-important. (2000: 7) ... while
American newspapers treat obituaries of public figures as occasions to record
historical facts, British newspapers in the past 15 years have increasingly
used the obituary as an interpretation of the life and career of the deceased,
often written in the first person by someone who knew him or her. (2000: 7)
The British obituary is often informal, chatty, anecdotal, even, affectionate,
making no pretence of objectivity or comprehensiveness. Indeed, some British
newspapers publish letters that supplement obituaries with additional stories
in the obituary section. This prac- tice, which moves the obituary even closer
to eulogy, is unknown in American journalism. In both countries, of course,
obituaries are devoted to persons whose lives have a public dimension and
therefore a claim on the public' s attention. In the USA, however, the public
is considered to have a `right to know' things about `public figures'; in
the USA, then, celebrities have diminished rights to privacy and protection
against defamation, whether written (libel) or oral (slander). According to
Gibaldi: Most states ... recognize the right of privacy in four respects:
1. Unreasonable intrusion on the seclusion of others 2. Appropriation of another'
sname or likeness without permission for advertising or purposes of trade
3. Unreasonable publicity of another' s private life 4. Publicity placing
another in a false light (Gibaldi, 1998: 58) But such strictures do not apply
to individuals who are of `public concern.' Similarly, whereas `in law, defamation
is a published false statement of fact about a living person that exposes
the person to public hatred, ridicule, contempt, or disgrace, induces an evil
opinion of the person in the minds of others, or deprives the person of friendly
relations in society', to be found guilty of defamation of a public figure
one must not only make a false statement, one must also know
5
it to
be false and make it with malicious intent or reckless disregard for whether
it is true (Gibaldi, 1998: 5~54). This diminished protec- tion is considered
the price of fame. It would seem odd and unreasonable to grant autobiographers
greater protection than other public figures from verbal harm. After all,
autobiographers have made themselves public figures in a parti- cularly deliberate
and distinctive wa by publishing their own lives. One of the distinctive features
of the so-called memoir boom of the 1990~ in the USA, at leas was the phenomenon
of the `nobody' memoir: the autobiographical volume by a hitherto unknown
person, often quite young, often female, and often with a medical or psychi-
atric condition (e.g., Susanna Kaysen, who chronicled her stay in a mental
hospital, and Lauren Slater, who wrote a book about her treatment for depression).
Such subjects seem to have sacrificed, if not violated, their own privacy
by the self-conscious publication of their private lives. Even if one could
defame a dead person, memoirists would have no claim to special protection
when it comes to obituary writing. And yet where legal issues are mooted (by
death, for example), perhaps we are justified in looking past merely legal
considerations. In any case, the predicament of those who become public figures
by way of their self-representation highlights both the power and the weakness
of the obituary as a form of life writing. Before I address how autobiographers
may be especially vulnerabl~ though not necessarily privilege subjects of
obituaries, however, I would like to address a more fundamental issue: whether
(and how) obituaries can harm their subjects. HARM TO THE DEAD The broader
question of whether it is possible to harm the dead at all may seem to have
a self-evident answer. To me, the answer seems obvious: of course the dead
can be harmed. But in discussing this issue with friends and colleagues, I
have found that responses vary considerably. At a colloquium on ethics and
life writing hosted by John Eakin at Indiana University in the fall of 2002,
this issue aroused heated discussion, much to my surprise. Not only did I
dis- cover that others think quite differently from me; I also discovered
that they consider their positio~ of course the dead cannot be harme to be
self-evident. (My informal survey, then, confirms what poststructuralism claims:
that `common sense' is often neither common nor sense.) Indeed, one member
of the colloquium, Diane Middlebrook, author of a controversial biography
of Anne Sexton, announced to
6
the
rest of us, `The dead belong to us.' It may be convenient, even necessary,
for biographers to believe that. But the first-person plural is a particularly
tricky deictic; in this biographer's pronouncement, its use may be an example
not of the royal but of the imperial `we'. Since, as John Maynard Keynes remarked,
we are all dead in the long run, perhaps we (the living) should not distinguish
ourselves too has- tily and too sharply from the dead. In any event, I do
not consider myself to be part of this biographer's `we'. I do not consider
the dead to belong to me; to pick up an earlier thread, I think that at most
only some of the dea namely, public figure `belong' to the living, to be disposed
of as we see fit. A provocative and, to me, compelling, account of the issue
of harm to the dead can be found in Joel Feinberg's Harm to others (Volume
1 of The moral limits of criminal law). The position that the dead cannot
be harmed, which is implied in the legal limitation of defamation to the living,
appears to have the strength of tautology. According to Feinberg, `in order
to be harmed, common sense reminds us, a person must be in existence at the
time, but death ... is the cessation of one's existence, the first moment
of a state of nonbeing, which is beyond harm or gain' (1984: 79). In this
view, it is impossible to harm the dead, since the dead are no longer subject
and `there cannot be harm without a subject to be harmed ' (1984: 80). The
drawback of this position becomes evident, however, when we realize that by
its logic killing a person does not entail harming that person, since death
obliterates the very subject whose existence is a precondition of harm. (It
may be difficult, but it is not impossible, to kill someone without causing
pain to that person in the process; and in this view, painless killing does
not constitute harm to the subject.) This is a counterintuitive and ethically
problematic position, to say the least. (So much for arguments against the
death penalt not to mention euthanasia.) Feinberg's way out of this ethical
dead end is through the defi- nition of harm as `setback interest', [which],`given
the universal inter- est in not dying, implies that death is a harm' (1984:
81). That is, to kill us is to harm us insofar as it entails a setback to
our interests, which we can no longer advance when we are dead. Feinberg suggests
that much of our dread of death stems from the realization that, once dead,
`we have no chance whatever of achieving those goals that are the ground of
our ultimate interest', most of which `require not simply that some result
be brought about, but rather that it be brought about by us, or if not by
us, then for us' (1984: 81). Feinberg's argument that death harms the person
leads him to the conclusion that posthumous harm is also possible. For `if
the prior
7
interests
set back by death justify our characterization of death as a harm (even without
a subject), then equally some of them [i.e., prior interests] warrant our
speaking of certain later events as posthumous harms' (1984: 82). He thus
arrives at the conclusion that undergirds my argument concerning Grealy's
obituary: We can think of some of a person' s interests as surviving [her]
death, just as some of the debts and claims of [her] estate do, and ... in
virtue of the defeat of these interests, either by death itself or by subsequent
events, we can think of the person who was, as harmed .... [She] is of course
at this moment dead, but that does not prevent us from refer- ring now, in
the present tense, to [her] interests, if they are still capable of being
blocked or fulfilled, just as we refer to [her] outstanding debts or claims,
if they are still capable of being paid. (1984: 83; I have taken the liberty
of changing the gender of Feinberg's pronouns) This argument provides a philosophical
foundatio if one is neede for the custom, in all cultures with which I am
familiar, of treating most corpses with respect and for the legal institution
of last wills and testaments, which enable one to enact one's desires after
one' s demise. In summary, while in some sense the dead are invulner- able
to harm, their interests survive them, and a posthumous setback to those interests
may be regarded as posthumous harm to them. Feinberg's account of posthumous
harm is pertinent to the obitu- ary of Lucy Grealy in two respects. First,
it helps to account for: Why we grieve for a young vigorous `victim of death'
[her]self, and not only for those who loved [her] and depended on [her]. We
grieve for [her] in virtue of [her] unfulfilled interests .... The moment
of death is the terminating boundary of one's biological life, but it is itself
an important event within the life of one's future-oriented interests. When
death thwarts an interest, the harm can be ascribed to the person who is no
more, charged as it were to [her] `moral estate'. (1984: 8~86) More important
for my purposes, Feinberg nominates `the interest every person has in [her]
own reputation' as the best example of inter- ests `from the purely self-regarding
category' (1984: 87). And he argues that, just as a setback to one's reputation
of which one is unaware while alive constitutes harm, posthumous damage to
one's reputation also involves harm (1984: 87). If one accepts Feinberg's
argumen as I d~ then the obituary is a particularly potent and fraught genre
of life writing insofar as it is the genre that first repre- sents the dea
who are not only, according to Feinberg, subject to
8
harm
but intrinsically incapable of defending themselves against it. I will argue
that Lucy Grealy's obituary is a particularly ironic example of death writing
inflicting posthumous harm on its subject. But before turning to her case,
I would like to expand on what I see as the special status of the obituary
among life-writing genres. FIRST AND LAST WORDS Life writing can be fundamentally
divided into first-person and third- person forms, forms of autobiography
and forms of (hetero)biogra- phy. Less obviously, but perhaps equally significantly,
life writing can also be arranged along a time line; on this continuum the
operat- ive distinction is not between first- and third-person points of view
but between first and last (i.e., earlier and later) words. In this schema,
the death of the subject is decisive because it puts an end to life writing
by, but not about, a particular subject. Indeed, bio- graphy may not only
continue after the subject's death but may be stimulated and authorized by
an event that may unseal lips and written records. At this critical juncture
on the time line are found those genres we might refer to as `death writing'.
Among these, in the USA the death notice may be first-person in point of view,
as it is written by someone who knew the subject; the obituary proper is always
third-person in point of view. The obituary occupies an especially, perhaps
uniquely, important place among life-writing genres not only for the obvious
reason that it announces and marks the passing of the subject but also because
it may, at least temporarily, fix the subject' s image in the public mind.
Obituaries are not always the last words on their subjects, but they are such
for the vast majority who never receive subsequent biographical treatment.
At the very least, then, the obitu- ary is the first posthumous word on its
subject; as such, an obituary in a major medium like the New York Times in
the USA or The Times of London in the UK may determine the image of its subject
for a substantial post-mortem perio until and unless it is supplemented or
supplanted by more extensive biographical consideration. One irony of its
status as the first last word is that the obituary is typically ante-mortem
in composition, though never in publication. The very famou those guaranteed
obituarie are thus subject to having their lives inscribed in the past tense
well in advance of their deaths; their obituaries thus precede rather than
follow their deaths, which simply confirm them: so-and-so is now actually
dead. (Only satirical media may spell this out, as The Onion did recently
to mark the passing, at the age of 100, of a man who served as South
9
Carolina's
US Senator for some 50 years: `Strom Thurmond finally, finally dies.') Such
canned obituaries, waiting to be precipitated into print, are akin to tombstones
with the date of birth already engraved and followed by a hyphen; I like to
think of them, then, as preposthumous. (One ironic consequence of such obituaries'
being written well before the death of their subjects is that they are some-
times published after the deaths of their authors, as was the case with the
New York Times obituary of Bob Hope. Like Thurmond, Hope was 100 when he died; his obituary was written by Vincent Canby, who predeceased him by three years.)
According to Alden Whitman, a complex calculus determines when a celebrity's
obituary is assigned. That calculus takes into account prominence and power
(so in the USA, Presidents have top priority), age, health, the availability
of materials, and `complexity'. In addition, as Whitman delicately puts it,
priority goes to those `whose careers and lifeworks are substan- tially behind
them and on whom, therefore, little updating is required at the moment of
death' (1971: 9). Along with newspaper clippings found in the appropriately
named `morgues', prospective obituary subjects sometimes serve as sources
for their own death writing. Whitman denies that such interviews are `ghoulish'
or that he ever felt like an `undertaker', let alone the Reaper himself: `elderly
people have reconciled themselves to mortality and are thus often willing
to look back over their lives with a mixture of pride, candor, detachment,
and even amusement' (1971: 10). Indeed, he says, `from these conversation
all the more frank and open because the person knows that what he says is
not for immediate quotatio emerges some of the best material' (1971: 12).
Still, such luminaries may be justified in feeling a bit paranoid when they
are approached by obituary writers ready to put the finishing touches on their
stories. (The ultimate scoop, I suppose, would be to have your subject drop
dead in midinterview and thus be in a position to offer an exclusive first-person
account of the subject' s last words.) THE MESSAGE OF THE MEDIUM Another inherent
characteristic of the obituary calls for mention in transition to the obituary
of Lucy Grealy: its brevity. Though length (and placement within an issue)
are calibrated to their subjects' pur- ported significance, obituaries are
of necessity among the briefest forms of life writing. (It is their brevity,
of course, that enables us to consume so many of them.) To twist an adage,
life is long, the obituary short. Therein lies the challenge: the obituary
must be condensed and
10
highly
selective, but it should not be reductive or formulaic, as I think Grealy's
is. Given her youth and the unexpectedness of her death, we can be sure that
Grealy's obituary was composed posthumously and hurriedly, and we should take
that into consideration in our judge- ment of it. Aside from interviews with
friends, Lehmann-Haupt ap- parently gleaned much of the substance of his obituary
from The Times's review of her memoir by Margo Jefferson. One senses that
Lehmann-Haupt's account of Grealy's life is based not on his reading of her
memoir but on his reading of a review of it. In any case, her life is gravely
diminished by its simplistic representation. The obituary credits Grealy with
having survived the medical ordeal of dozens of operations from childhood
well into her thirties and also the emotional ordeal of being stared at and
ridiculed. But this account of her life renders it in the familiar and mildly
oppressive formula of triumph over adversity, giving little sense of the com-
plexity with which she came to view her own predicament. The prob- lem with
the script of overcoming adversity is that it represents disability entirely
as a personal tragedy rather than a social and cul- tural construct, removing
any stigma from the overcomer but not from the condition in question. In Grealy's
case, rather than attend- ing to the forces that shaped her, it attends only
to the shape those forces threatened to impose on her. Such a script is patronizing.
She is `brave little Lucy' as long as she struggles, `poor little Lucy' when
she becomes `despondent'. Such an account of her life denies social and cultural
complicity in her predicament. Indeed, it tends to characterize her as a monomaniac,
if not a narcissis concerned only with her appearance (even as the obituary
acknowledges that her book gives a very different impression of her). Perhaps
the review's most telling passage is this: ` ``When my face gets fixed, then
I'll start living,' ' she said she told herself.' This is one of only two
quotations from her book; presented uncontextualized and unqualified, as it
is in the obituary, where it is given a paragraph of its own, it is somewhat
misleading. Had Grealy believed that her life would begin only when her face
was fixed, then she would not have had a life, and she could not have produced
any `life writing', much less the book she wrote. The story of such a life
would have had to begin with her surgical normalization, but the book she
wrote is about living with an unfixed and perhaps unfixable face. Indeed,
if there is a false note in The autobiography of a face, it is the closure
Grealy provides, somewhat suddenly and facilely, in its final pages, where
she suggests that she had passed a turning point: `And then I experienced
a moment of the freedom I'd been practicing for behind my Halloween mask all
those years ago. As a child I had expected my
11
liberation
to come from getting a new face to put on, but now I saw it came from shedding
something, shedding my image' (1995: 222). As her obituary indicates, however,
she continued to undergo operations on her face, confirming that the narrative's
closure was somewhat forced, supplied perhaps in response to the presumed
requirement of the form. In any case, the obituary's account of her death
cancels out its own narrative of triumph and is at odds with her twin sister's
testimony that, with the publication of her book, she `saw her life in a different
way. She felt [that] she had gotten her message out, that she had found herself,
that her face had become acceptable' (Lehmann-Haupt, 2002: B7). The implication
that she committed suicide out of despondency about her appearance suggests
that the pride and determination the obituary ascribes to her were not enough
in the end. We should remember that Christopher Lehmann-Haupt had to produce
his obituary under the pressure of a deadline and had to interview grieving
colleagues, friends and relatives to do so. What I perceive as the shortcomings
of his obituary are in part literally that, characteristics related to the
brevity of the form rather than to his execution of it. Let me explain by
reference to another bit of death writing about Lucy Grealy, a reminiscence
published in New York magazine in March 2003, within months of her death,
by a close friend, the writer Ann Patchett. Beneath its title appears the
following text, as a tease: In her dazzling Autobiography of a face, Lucy
Grealy detailed her quest to reclaim her jaw, disfigured by cancer. Suddenly,
she was the toast of literary New York, beloved for her quick wit and wild
streak, saluted for her grit. But her endless surgeries left her so weak,
impoverished, and dependent on drugs that even her dearest friends couldn'
t save her. (2003: 30) Here again, a compact narrative inscribes her life
as a complex tragic plo a rise in fortune followed by a fatal decline; moreover,
this summary suggests that this friend's memoir will corroborate, rather than
challenge, the obituary's representation of her as a pathetic and possibly
suicidal victi of cancer, rather than of depression, or oppression. In fact,
Patchett's reminiscence does imply that Grealy's self- destructive behaviour,
which involved heroin addiction, was suicidal in effect, if not in intent; to that extent it corroborates her obituary. (This is perhaps not surprising:
Patchett may have been one of the friends interviewed for the obituary.) Yet
her reminiscence is less dis- turbing to me than the obituary. Why? For one
thing, it is evidently
12
written
by someone who knew Grealy well and cared deeply about her. For another, it
does not attribute her emotional trouble solely to her disfigurement. (The
title, `The face of pain', suggests that her emotional pain did not stem solely
from her disfigurement.) Further, Patchett's story is long enough to contextualize
Grealy's persistent pursuit of outer beauty and to suggest what was behind
it. It begins, then, to supply what her obituary tends to elide or erase; it thus high- lights the partiality and peculiarity of the obituary as a form
of life writing. Reading Patchett's account made me realize how the obituary,
despite the seemingly obligatory list of known survivors, is conventionally,
if not inherently, non- or even anti-relational in its approach. Among life-writing
genres, it isolates and individualizes its subject to an extreme degree. So
if Patchett's magazine memoir in effect confirms the obituary's implications
about Grealy's death, by detailing her loneliness, depression and self-destructive
habits, including addiction to pre- scribed painkillers and illegal drugs,
it does so with greater authority and transparency than the obituary; at least
it gives some biogra- phical evidence for its interpretation. Also, and not
incidentally, it suggests that Grealy's most significant disability was not
her dis- figurement, but clinical depression. This may have manifested itself
in terms of feelings of ugliness, but must have been a function also of physiological
factor brain chemistr and cultural factor the cult of female beauty. At the
same time, I am somewhat troubled by Patchett's piece for some of the same
reasons that I am troubled by the obituary. Both tend to reinforce a view
of disability that is misleading and marginaliz- ing. Portraying Grealy as
triumphing over adversity or as succumbing to it by suicide are in the end
not such radically different representa- tions of her: they are two sides
of the same coin, the comic and tragic versions of the same agon experienced
by an atomistic individual. Both ignore the larger context of Grealy's disfigurement
and the way in which it represents institutional and cultural oppression.
For Grealy's problem was, even more than she seems to have acknowl- edged,
not hers alone, and this may in fact be why her book had such broad appeal.
For one thing, it was not cancer but its treatment that disfigured her; the
face she wanted fixed was the face that state-of-the- art biomedicine gave
her. For another, her predicament was merely an extreme version of a common
one, especially among wome that of feeling a great deal, perhaps literally
one' s life, depends on presenting an acceptable, norma~symmetrical, if not
beautiful, face to the world. One of the book's crucial revelations is that
young Lucy first became aware of the anomaly of her appearance not spontaneously,
13
by
regarding herself in the mirror, but by picking up on others' responses to
her, including her mother's attempt to normalize her postchemotherapy appearance
by providing her with a wig (1995: ch. 6). It was thus the metaphorical mirror
of others' responses to her that first alerted her to the problem of her appearance,
which a look in a literal mirror could only confirm (1995: 1112). Her book
may thus be regarded as in part an attempt to deflect the stares to which
she was subjected. One of its great virtues is to demon- strate, albeit not
programmatically and perhaps not entirely intention- ally, how indeterminate
her face was, how differently it signified at successive stages of her life
and in various institutional settings: in pri- mary, secondary and postsecondary
school; at home, at the hospital, at work. The testimony of her book is not
that she considered herself finally a heroine or a victim but rather that
she was continually renego- tiating her `face value' in changing circumstances.
A crucial and saving epiphany was that `Perhaps my face was a gift to be used
toward under- standing and enlightenment' (1995: 180). Using her face in that
way was an endeavour that was not, and could not have been, concluded by the
completion of her memoir, yet it is perhaps the foundation of its value. To
come to terms with her face was to contest others' view(s) of it, to stare
back, however modestly and indirectly. To suggest otherwise is to deny the
role of culture in what was undoubtedly an ordeal, but one that made her not
only a writer but a life writer. What is wrong with the obituar and the particular
way it harms he~ is the way it misreads her life, despite her having `willed'
it to us in death-defying print. This is not a matter of ruining her reputatio
apparently, the obituary deliberately withheld what was felt to be a scandalous
fact about her deat~ but rather of over- writing and oversimplifying her complex
self-representation. So while I do not hold that memoirists have a `right'
to control their own posthumous images or deserve a privileged status as subjects
of obituaries, I think that the fact that such a well-meaning obituary as
Grealy's can so subtly but so drastically controvert her self- representatio
setting back, I would say, her interest in `getting her message out suggests
that life writers are particularly prone to posthumous harm by their obituaries.
And that is partly because the obituary tends to review the lif particularly
when death is early and unexpecte in terms of the cir- cumstances of the death.
Perhaps not surprisingly, but nevertheless problematically, death writing
tends to privilege death, a single event rarely in control of the subject,
giving it a disproportionate and often misleading significance.3 The writing
of the death threatens to rewrite the life and, in the case of autobiographers,
also the subject's life
14
writing.
The practice of interpreting the entire course of a subject's life in light
of its ending is a convention presumably borrowed from litera- ture that is
fictive (i.e., the novel) and/or religious (i.e., hagiography); however, what
makes sense in those genres, in which the ending is shaped intentionally and
sometimes teleologically, does not necessar- ily make sense in secular life
writing. Thus, Grealy's deat even if it had been a suicid should not persuade
us that her self-represen- tation was false. But the situation of the obituary
in the writing of a particular individual's life favours the overinterpretation
of the end- ing. Unfortunately, it may thus tend to overwrite earlier self-
representation and unduly shape later biographical representation. The misrepresentations
inherent in obituaries and their unique significance in print cultures make
them peculiarly likely to disfigure the dead.
NOTES
1 According to Janice Hume,
`when medical science took hold in the USA in the mid- to late-nineteenth
century, obituaries began listing more specific causes of death.' Some causes
were effectively taboo - notably murder and suicide - but the reluctance
to mention suicide as a cause of death has weakened significantly (2000:
143-44). The New York Times does report suicide as a cause of death
under some circumstances. See, for example, the obituary of the artist Fred
Sandback: `Mr Sandback, who suffered from depression, committed suicide,
said his wife, Amy Baker Sandback' (Johnson, 2003: para. 2).
2 In a piece called `News
of a lifetime' , Max Frankel, a New York Times editor and columnist,
acknowledged this, even as he exempted his own paper: `In most newsrooms,
obituary writing is thought to be work for neophytes or burned-out veterans....
On many days, the New York Times is a glorious exception.... The
Times assigns obituaries to good writers, often those with direct knowledge
of the person's achievements, and to sensitive editors who aim to balance
candor and respect.' He also acknowledges that the British model is different:
`As a handful of British newspapers have repeatedly shown, obituaries should
be written by articulate history buffs and affectionate biographers' (1995:
28).
3 This may not be so true
in Britain; according to Elaine Showalter, whereas `American newspapers describe
the causes of death ... British newspapers omit the medical details' (2000:
para. 4).
REFERENCES
Adams, L.
2002: Almost famous: the rise of the `nobody' memoir . Washington Monthly, April 2002, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com /features/2001/ 0204.adams.html . Last accessed 11 December 2003 .
15
Canby, V.
2003: Bob Hope, master of one-liners and friend to G.I.'s,
dies at 100. New York Times, 29 July 2003, http://nytimes.com/2003/07/29/ obituaries/29HOPE. Last accessed
11 December 2003.
Feinberg, J.
1984: The moral limits of the criminal law. Volume 1.
Harm to others. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Frankel, M.
1995: News of a lifetime. New York Times
Magazine , 11 June 1995, p. 28.
Gibaldi, J.
1998: The MLA style manual and guide to scholarly publishing , second edition. New York: Modern
Language Association.
Grealy, L.
1995: Autobiography of a face. New
York: HarperPerennial.
Hume, J.
2000: Obituaries in American culture. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Johnson, K.
2003: Fred Sandback, sculptor of minimalist installations,
dies at 59. New York Times, 26 June 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/ 26/o.../ 26SAND.html. Last accessed
11 December 2003.
Kinsley, M.
1992: Death warmed over. New Republic , 21 December 1992, p. 6.
Lehmann-Haupt, C.
2002: Lucy Grealy, 39, who wrote a memoir on her disfigurement . New York Times, 21 December 2002,
p. B7.
Patchett, A.
2003: The face of pain. New York, March 2003, pp. 30-37.
Showalter, E.
2000: Way to go: on why obituaries are a business in
the US and art in the UK. The Guardian, Saturday Review section, 2 September 2000, p. 7.
Slater, L.
19998. Prozac diary. New York:
Random House.
Taylor, D.
2001: Obituaries. In Jolly,
M., editor, Encyclopedia of life writing. Volume 2. L-Z . London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 667-68.
The Onion 2003: Strom Thurmond
finally, finally dies. The Onion, 2 July 2003, http://www.theonion.com/onion3925/index.html. Last accessed 10
July 2003.
Whitman, A.
1971: The art of the obituary. In Whitman,
A., The obituary book. New York: Stein and Day, 7-13.
NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR G. THOMAS COUSER is a Professor of English and Director of
Disability Studies at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. His recent
books are Recovering bodies: illness, disability, and life writing (Wisconsin,
1997) and Vulnerable subjects: ethics and life writ- ing (Cornell, 2004).
His work has been assigned in universities in Canada, the UK and New Zealand
as well as the USA.