Pathography

Subgenre of biography

It would be futile to blind ourselves to the fact that readers today find all pathography unpalatable. They clothe their aversion in the complaint that a pathological review of a great man never results in an understanding of his importance and his achievements, and that it is therefore a piece of senseless impertinence to make a study of things in him that could just as easily be found in the first person one came aross. --Sigmund Freud

Its motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct. --Joyce Carol Oates