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“The Work of Life Writing collects several of the most important essays
of G. Thomas Couser’s exemplary career at the forefront of life writing
scholarship. Reminding us that life writing deserves our attention for its
social significance as much as its artistic strength, these dozen pieces treat
the many varieties of life writing as unique literary forms that enact rela-
tionships and identities, especially under-represented ones. It was Couser
who reminded us that memoir is our most democratic of genres, and who
brought the study of life writing to bear on disability and illness repre-
sentation—one of the most important shifts in literary disability study in
the past twenty years. This is a book for students and scholars alike, and
will appeal to anyone compelled by the important cultural work of auto/
biographical texts.”
Susannah B. Mintz, Professor of English, Skidmore College
“G. Thomas Couser is a central figure in the field of life writing. His lively
and accessible prose enters into conversation with scholarship in a variety
of fields, including disability studies, narrative medicine, pedagogy (liter-
ary studies, creative writing), cultural studies, and sociology. Readers will
appreciate having some of his harder-to-find pieces, along with some of
his best-known essays, collected in one volume. This book demonstrates
the ways in which memoir and autobiography, even those forms that are
unlikely to garner critical acclaim, should be taken seriously as forces
with the potential to shape our everyday lives. I appreciate the personal
touches in his writing—his work feels urgent because, as a reader, I have
the opportunity to learn about the life experiences that inspired it.”
Megan Brown, Professor of English, Drake University
The Work of Life Writing
Life writing, in its various forms, does work that other forms of expres-
sion do not; it bears on the world in a way distinct from imaginative
genres like fiction, drama, and poetry; it acts in and on history in signifi-
cant ways. Memoirs of illness and disability often seek to depathologize
the conditions that they recount. Memoirs of parents by their children
extend or alter relations forged initially face to face in the home. At a
time when memoir and other forms of life writing are being produced
and consumed in unprecedented numbers, this book reminds readers that
memoir is not mainly a “literary” genre or mere entertainment. Similarly,
letters are not merely epiphenomena of our “real lives.” Correspondence
does not just serve to communicate; it enacts and sustains human rela-
tionships. Memoir matters, and there’s life in letters. All life writing arises
of our daily lives and has distinctive impacts on them and the culture in
which we live.
G. Thomas Couser received his doctorate in American Civilization at

Brown University in 1977. After teaching English at Connecticut College,
he moved on to Hofstra University, where he founded and directed a
Disability Studies Program. From his dissertation on, his scholarship
has been concerned with autobiography and memoir, especially with life
writing stimulated by disability and illness and the ethics of life writing.
Routledge Auto/Biography Studies
Series Editor: Ricia A Chansky
Inscribed Identities: Life Writing as Self-Realization

Joan Ramon Resina
Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies

Edited by Ashley Barnwell and Kate Douglas
The Autobiography Effect

Writing the Self in Post-Structuralist Theory
Dennis Schep
Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women

Translingual Selves
Natalie Edwards
A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography

Between Dissociation and Belonging
Ariel M. Sheetrit
Writing Life Writing

Narrative, History, Autobiography
Paul John Eakin
The Birth and Death of the Author

A Multi-Authored History of Authorship in Print
Edited by Andrew J. Power
Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation

Overwriting the Dictator
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Essays and Lectures
G. Thomas Couser
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.rout-

ledge.com/Routledge-Auto-Biography-Studies/book-series/AUTO
Essays and Lectures
G. Thomas Couser
First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of G. Thomas Couser to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-62078-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-62081-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10784-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Global, India
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 Prologue: Death and Life Writing: Reflections on

My Morbid Career 1
2 Introduction: The Work of Memoir 10
3 Quality-of-Life Writing: Illness, Disability, and

Contemporary American Memoir 22
4 Is There a Body in This Text? Embodiment in

Graphic Somatography 35
5 Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation 62
6 Memoir and (Lack of) Memory: Filial Narratives of

Paternal Dementia 77
7 Paper Orphans: Writers’ Children Write Their Lives 94
8 Filiation in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father 113
9 Disability, Depression, Diagnosis, and Harm:

Reflections on Two Personal Scenarios 123
10 Vulnerable Subjects: Caveat Scriptor 139
11 The Shape of Death in American Autobiography 149

viii Contents
12 On “Freedom Writing”: Expression and Repression 162
13 Life in Letters: Letters as Life 170
Index 190
Illustrations
4.1 Al Davison, The Spiral Cage, Blind and Sighted

Drawing. (Artwork © Copyright Al Davison-TAG!
Reprinted by permission of Al Davison.) 40
4.2 “Graphic Continuum.” Excerpt from p. 29 from
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. (Copyright
© 1993, 1994 by Scott McCloud. Reprinted by
permission of HarperCollins Publishers.) 42
4.3 “Cartoon as Vacuum.” Excerpt from p. 36 from
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. (Copyright
© 1993, 1994 by Scott McCloud. Reprinted by
permission of HarperCollins Publishers.) 43
4.4 Eugene Richards, “After chemotherapy, Dorchester,
Massachusetts, 1979” (© 1979 Eugene Richards,
courtesy of the artist.) 45
4.5 “Chemo Nausea.” Excerpt from p. 34 from Cancer
Made Me a Shallower Person by Miriam Engelberg.
(Copyright © 2006 by Miriam Engelberg. Reprinted by
permission of HarperCollins.) 46
4.6 “Pre-surgery Breasts.” Excerpt from p. 97 from Cancer
4.7 “Visible Tumors.” Excerpt from p. 107 from Cancer
4.8 Brian Fies, Mom’s Cancer, “Told You So What.” Mom’s
Cancer. (© 2006 Brian Fies.) 49
4.9 Julia Wertz, The Infinite Wait, Self-infantilization.
(Reprinted by permission of Judith Wertz and Koyama Press.) 50
x Illustrations
4.10 Excerpts from Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My
Mother, and Me. (Copyright (©) 2010 by Sarah Leavitt.
Used with the permission of Freehand Books [Calgary,
AB] and Skyhorse Publishing [US], and by permission
of Samantha Haywood [international].) 52
4.11 Al Davison, The Spiral Cage, Realistic Nude Self-
portrait. (Artwork ©️ Copyright Al Davison-TAG!
Reprinted by permission of Al Davison.) 54
4.12 Judith Vanistendael, When David Lost His Voice,
Diagnostic Sketch. (Reprinted by permission of Judith
Vanistendael.) 55
Diagnostic Interview. (Reprinted by permission of
Judith Vanistendael.) 56
Subjective Reaction. (Reprinted by permission of Judith
Vanistendael.) 57
Therapeutic Regimen. (Reprinted by permission of
Judith Vanistendael.) 58
13.1 My father’s Wesleyan College yearbook photo, 1927 171
13.2 Letter of recommendation for Isaac Couser from
Bessbrook Spinning Company, 1910 172
13.3 Rosalind Parker Manchester Central High School
yearbook photo, 1923 174
13.4 Note to Dad from Rody 175
13.5 Hand-drawn Map of Aleppo 177
13.6 Wedding day photo of my parents, August 1941 180
13.7 Letter from Theodore Nutting to his mother and sister, 1863 181
13.8 Dad on Navy ship in PTO, 1945 185
Acknowledgements
For a book like this, coming at the end of my career and surely my last,
acknowledgments must be especially capacious and inevitably incom-
plete: so many colleagues and friends have assisted and encouraged me
for so many years.
But here’s at least a partial list of those whom I wish to thank, in no
particular order: the late James M Cox, for interesting me in autobiogra-
phy when I was still an undergraduate at Dartmouth College; John Eakin,
for the example of his work and for opportunities to speak at Indiana
University; Susan Merrill Squier and Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff for
inviting me speak at “PathoGraphics” in Berlin; Neil Vickers and Brian
Hurwitz for the opportunity to deliver “Quality-of-life Writing” at Kings
College, London; Craig Howes for welcoming my work at Biography;
Becky Hogan and Joe Hogan for nurturing a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
for so many years; Ricia Chansky Sancinito and Emily Hipchen for
continuing to develop that journal (and more); Maureen Perkins for
welcoming my work at Life Writing; Julia Watson for the nudge that
led me to propose this collection; Stephen Mansfield for his interest
in my work on patriography; Sarah Brophy for her skillful editing of
“Is There a Body in This Text?”; Willard Spiegelman, for welcoming
“Freedom Writing” at Southwest Review; my Hofstra colleagues Lee
Zimmerman and John Bryant for their supportive friendship; Megan
Coyer, for the invitation to deliver “Vulnerable Subjects” at Glasgow
University; Mel and Cindy Yoken, for inviting me to deliver “Life in
Letters: Letters as Life” at Brown University; Sophie Vallas and Claire
Sorin, for the invitation to write “Death and Life Writing: Reflections on
My Morbid Career”; Rosemarie-Garland Thomson, for welcoming me
into the field of Disability Studies in mid-career; Susannah Mintz, for
collaboration and counsel.
Reaching much further back, I am indebted to my parents, Ann Van
Stelten and William Griffith Couser, both public school English teachers,
for encouraging my interest in reading when I was a child and adolescent.
And reaching back through half of my life, Barbara Zabel for sharing and
shaping it into a fulfilling existence.
1 Prologue: Death and Life
Writing
Reflections on My Morbid
Career*
The editors of this special issue honored me greatly by citing early work
of mine in their call for papers: “The Embodied Self,” my introduction to
a 1991 special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on “Illness, Disability,
and Lifewriting”; and “The Shape of Death in American Autobiography,”
which appeared in the Hudson Review in 1978.1 Their doing so has
prompted me to reflect on my long-term interest in the complex relations
between life writing and death.
When I published the Hudson Review essay, I was in my early thirties,
a recently minted PhD in American Studies and a beginning professor of
English. The essay grew out of my dissertation, American Autobiography:
The Prophetic Mode, which traced a distinctive mode of autobiography
from the Puritans to (then) contemporary life writers like Norman Mailer
and Malcolm X. Although it discussed many of the same texts as the dis-
sertation, the essay’s focus was different; it explored the vexed relation
between the limits of autobiography as a form of life writing and the
limits of life itself—i.e., a relation between a medium and mortality.
The sole distinction, by definition, between (allo)biography and
autobiography is that the former can be written by anyone other than the
subject, while the latter is written only by the subject. That distinction
entails another: autobiography is inherently incomplete. No matter how
long or comprehensive, an autobiography can never contain the whole
chronological extent of a life: it cannot include the death of its subject,
much less conclude with it, as biography often does.
But the fact that autobiography cannot “contain” the death of the
author literally, as its final event, does not mean that it is not shaped
by death—not “about” the death of the subject in some way. Indeed,
one might argue that thoughtful, reflective autobiography (or mem-
oir) is often haunted, even impelled, by the authors’ awareness of the
* This essay served as a foreword to a special issue of Revue Electronique d’études

sur le monde anglophone in 2017: “Narratives of the (Un)self: American
Autothanatographers, 17th–21st Centuries.” Reprinted here by permission.
2 Prologue: Death and Life Writing
inevitability of their own deaths and of the genre’s inherent incom-
pleteness. Even when it is not written in the expectation of immi-
nent demise, then, it may be written in the (fore)shadow of death. To
demonstrate this in my essay, I explored ways in which a selection
of well-known American writers—Jonathan Edwards, John Woolman,
Benjamin Franklin, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and
Malcolm X—addressed their own deaths in one fashion or another
in their life writing: rehearsing it (as Edwards did, by seeking to be
“swallowed up in God”), substituting for it (as Woolman did, by using
the death of another Friend to stand in for his own), embracing it (as
Franklin did, by playfully characterizing writing his life as re-living it),
transcending it (as Thoreau and Whitman did, by dissolving themselves
in nature and others, respectively), pre-empting it (as Adams did, by
narrating his story in the third person as history), and memorializing
himself (as Malcolm X did, by accelerating his narrative to register a
Muslim persona to survive him). To probe beneath the surface of a
serious autobiography, I argued, is to expose the author’s recognition
of mortality.
As I wrote at the time,
Many classic American autobiographies betray the pressure of a pro-

found concern with death. The expectation of death may impel the
writer, as though the composition of an autobiography might help
him to compose himself in the face of death. Or he may hope that the
finished narrative will endow him with a kind of immortality. More
importantly, the form and content of the narratives are often signifi-
cantly shaped by the writer’s preoccupation with death, even though
the event itself eludes direct treatment. Two problems overlap here in
an interesting way. As a mortal, the writer may seek to come to terms
with death. As an autobiographer, he may want to write a conclusion
which, in its finality and significance, will somehow be equivalent to
his own death.
(Couser, “The Shape of Death,” 53)
Rather than reexamining those texts further here, I wish to reflect on

the preoccupation with death that seems to pervade my academic writ-
ing. The origin of this preoccupation is not far to seek, and I was certainly
aware of it when I composed my Hudson Review essay; what remained
obscure to me for a long time was its lasting effect. Looking back now,
however, I can see that my scholarly corpus (pun intended) may seem
quite morbid. And I am struck by the fact that over the course of my
career, without setting out to do so, I have explored how a number of life-
writing genres stand in different relations to death and thus offer quite
different responses to what may be the most important of the so-called
“facts of life”—that we all die.
Prologue: Death and Life Writing 3
The genesis of this morbidity was the successive deaths of my parents
in a short period of time: my mother’s, in the fall of 1974; my father’s,
the following spring. I was in my late twenties. My mother had survived
breast cancer in her fifties only to be diagnosed ten years later with the
ovarian cancer that took her life within a year. Though far from painless,
her dying was a gradual, graceful decline during which the family had
time to say our goodbyes and to grieve in advance. My father’s dying was
of a different order. He had become deeply and chronically depressed in
his early sixties; one way he coped was to drink secretly and self-destruc-
tively—behavior that is known, euphemistically and paradoxically, as
“self-medicating.” No treatment, not even electroshock administered at
Boston’s acclaimed McLean Hospital, alleviated his pain. His death was
the shocking, but not surprising, denouement to his binges.
I found the circumstances of his death not only distressing but shameful.
As far as I knew, his drinking had been a closely held secret: how was I to
explain to extended family, colleagues, and friends the seemingly sudden
death of an otherwise fit and youthful sixty-nine-year old? More than
distress and shame, I felt some responsibility—I lived not far away and
thought I should have interceded. Worse, I felt guilty: I feared that a frank
letter I had written him as an epistolary “intervention” had sent him into
a downward spiral. He had told my mother that if I ever found out about
his drinking, it would “destroy” him. I did find out; I confronted him, and
our relationship was never the same.
Clearing out my family home after my father’s death, I discovered a
cache, a trove, of documents stored in a closet behind his bed; mostly
personal correspondence from friends and romantic partners, they shed
light on aspects of his life that I had not been aware of—e.g., he had
romantic friendships with several gay male friends—or gave me intimate
access to aspects of his life of which I had been aware, like his service
in the Navy during World War II and a stint as a missionary-teacher in
Aleppo, Syria, in the 1930s. This discovery, a consequence of my father’s
death, gave me unexpected posthumous access to his life, through his
and others’ life writing. (The archive, an accumulation of documents,
some official—marriage licenses and passports—most not, itself consti-
tutes an ill-defined “genre” of life writing—not quite a scrapbook but a
consciously chosen and retained set of documents.) At the time, I was
too traumatized by his death to explore them in depth; I was not ready
to plunge into his life at the time. I sorted them, boxed them, and stored
them, knowing that the time would come for me to reckon with them.
In the next academic year I wrote my dissertation, which gave rise in
turn to my essay. Occurring just at the outset of my career as a scholar of
life writing, then, my parents’ deaths, particularly my father’s, profoundly
affected my approach to life writing, first by prompting my thoughts on
“the shape of death” in American autobiography. For the next decade,
however, the only evidence of a thanatological orientation in my work
was the Hudson Review essay. That changed in the early 1990s, when I
began to focus on the representation of embodiment in contemporary life
writing. On the conscious level, this turn was a response to an upsurge
in memoirs of illness and disability, which foregrounded the body. No
one I knew of was studying this phenomenon, and I set out to do so pri-
marily (or so I thought) out of intellectual curiosity: what does it mean
that this kind of life writing is appearing now? What are its sources, its
implications?
If I had been asked at the time, then, whether this turn to pathology
and pathography had a source in my own family, I would have denied
it. This despite that the fact that my mother’s diabetic sister had died of
insulin shock in her thirties, when I was a child, causing my parents to
take in her daughter temporarily; this despite the fact that my father’s
mother had been an invalid, due to Parkinson’s disease, nearly as long as I
knew her; this despite the fact that my mother needed to use a wheelchair
during her terminal illness; this despite the fact that both my father and
my sister had been hospitalized for depression. And this despite the
fact that my wife and I had recently failed to conceive a child through
in-vitro fertilization. I was deep in denial of the pathology permeating my
immediate family. That was largely, I suppose, a matter of categorizing
and of resisting stigma: I didn’t think of these conditions as disabilities or
think of these people as “other.”
One of the somatic conditions I focused on in Recovering Bodies:
Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997) was breast cancer, to which
I devoted a long chapter: “Self-Reconstruction: Personal Narratives of
Breast Cancer.” Such narratives are always written in the shadow of
death—most obviously, those by bereaved partners, or children: these
are posthumous and elegiac. But even those written by “survivors” are
informed by a sense of mortality. After all, survival (really, remission) is
defined by years without recurrence; it is never definitive—until the sur-
vivor dies of something else. So survivors write in the knowledge that the
disease may return to claim them.
When writing that chapter, I was certainly aware of my personal stake
in the topic: my mother had had a radical mastectomy in the 1960s, when
it was unheard of for a woman to narrate her illness experience, and a
cousin to whom I was quite close died of breast cancer in 1990. The only
explicit acknowledgment of this in the book was its dedication to my
dead cousin. I suppressed my own sense of involvement and loss, but I
was evidently engaged by the contemporary expression of a story that
had gone untold in my own family.
In America in the 1990s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a major stimulus
to thanatological life. No one I was very close to had had AIDS, and I was
not at risk; I had no personal stake in the topic. But the epidemic inevitably
manifested itself in life writing, as well as in more literary genres, and I
devoted a chapter of Recovering Bodies to “HIV/AIDS and its Stories.” The
course of the epidemic can be traced in the succession of life-writing genres
that registered it. First, there was the obituary, one of the most common
and widely read of life-writing genres. In the Anglophone world, obituar-
ies typically provide the age at, and cause of, death up front. In the case of
closeted gay men, however, to name AIDS as their cause of death would
have been to out them, which survivors and news media were reluctant
to do. As a result, early in the epidemic, AIDS was often concealed under
the vague rubric “a long illness.” That changed, of course, and the outing
of many gay men by AIDS had a significant impact on public awareness
of both homosexuality and AIDS. Thus, a most commonplace life-writing
genre played a role in the gay rights movement.
Other life-writing genres also registered the epidemic. Early on, when
AIDS was not survivable, first-person narratives were limited to the diary
(and there were not many of those) and the memoir by a grieving rela-
tive or partner. Eventually, however, new treatments made possible first-
person narratives by survivors. With AIDS, as with breast cancer, then,
autopathography played a powerful role in a minority rights movement.
Prompted by death, or by life-threatening illness, memoir was revitalized
by marginalized groups. So death by disease powerfully shaped American
life writing in the last decades of the twentieth century.
My interest in “vulnerable subjects” led me to scrutinize other genres
of life narrative. Vulnerable subjects are individuals who are liable to
harmful representation to which they are unable to respond. For the
most part, these are people with disabilities that prevent or impede self-
representation—such as severely autistic children, whose parents may
represent them in memoir; or parents with dementia, whose children
may assume authority over their life narratives. But my concern with
vulnerable subjects prompted a critique of another type of life writing,
narratives of assisted suicide, which is illegal in most of the United States
and controversial throughout the States. These are typically written by
family members who accept the decisions of their loved ones to end their
lives and may even have collaborated or assisted in the suicides. As a
result, such narratives belong to the genre of the apologia: they defend
and justify an act or course of action taken by the author. In chapter
6 of Vulnerable Subjects, “Life Writing as Death Writing: Disability
and Euthanography,” my objection is not to assisted suicide as such.
Rather, what I find problematic about the narratives is the message of
the medium: that death is better than disability. While these narratives
honor choices of the deceased, they are inimical to the interests of people
with serious disabilities, a very vulnerable population, by reinforcing the
all-too-common assumption that they’d be better off dead. As assisted
suicide gains more adherents and becomes legal in some jurisdictions, the
significance of such narratives is all the greater.
In my estimation, the dead also qualify as vulnerable subjects; they are
susceptible to harm insofar as they have an interest in their posthumous
legacies. A case in point is the New York Times obituary of Lucy Grealy,
author of Autobiography of a Face, an account of growing up with a face
disfigured by treatment for Ewing’s sarcoma. Grealy died in 2002 of a
heroin overdose, a cause of death that is often elided or disguised behind
the phrase “died unexpectedly” or hinted at by reference to “a struggle
with addiction.” Instead of either formulation, the Times obituary stated
that Grealy had “died at a friend’s house. . . . She was 39. No cause of
death was announced. Friends said she had been despondent over opera-
tions she underwent two years ago” (Lehmann-Haupt B7).
Presumably, the editors thought they were doing her and her family a
favor by not mentioning the cause of death. But by linking her death at
such a young age to despondency over cosmetic surgeries, the obituary
hints at suicide (another stigmatized and often concealed cause of death)
impelled by shame about her appearance. In the U.S. today there is a
trend toward candor about deaths by overdose, in the face of an epidemic
of opioid abuse, and by suicide, at a time of troubling frequency among
young and middle-aged people (so-called “deaths of despair”). Absent
a suicide note, deaths by overdose are inherently ambiguous: unless
the dosage is grossly excessive, it is impossible to know whether it was
intended to kill. In Grealy’s case, she had resumed using heroin after a
period of abstinence; at such times, it is common for users to overestimate
their tolerance, so her death was almost certainly an accident.
Although Grealy was in some sense a public figure, by virtue of the
success of her memoir, the cause of her death is not really a matter of
public interest. In this case, however, editorial media restraint about her
drug use led to the implication of suicide. This is highly problematic
because it conflicts with the thrust of her autobiography, which was that
Grealy had come to terms with her face. That is not to say that she was
content with her appearance—hence the repeated operations—but rather
that she did not consider it a measure of her worth. In “Lucy Grealy
and the Some Body Obituary” (chapter 8 of Signifying Bodies), I argued
that her obituary overwrote her self-authored narrative when she had no
opportunity to respond. In writing her death the way it did, the obituary
contradicted her own “life.”
The issue is larger than Grealy. Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disabled
lawyer, activist, and advocate, suffered a similar injury. She had publicly
debated the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, challenging his view that
it is permissible for parents to kill a disabled infant, and in her memoir
Too Old to Die Young, she had written lyrically of the special pleasures
of her disabled life—for example, being bathed by her care-giver. Yet
when she died, the New York Times commissioned Singer to write her
obituary, which was titled “Happy Nevertheless.” As Elizabeth Barnes
points out, in The Minority Body, “McBryde went to great lengths . . .
during her life to explain that she was not happy nevertheless. She was
just happy, like so many other flourishing disabled people. But she wasn’t
believed just as she predicted—in the very same paper—she wouldn’t be
believed” (Barnes 138). Barnes refers to this conventional discounting of
disabled individuals’ claims of good quality of life as a form of “testimo-
nial injustice.” It is exacerbated in the case of obituaries: as post-mortem
life-writing, obituaries are always at risk of violating the principles and
values of those they presume to honor.
Like the obituary, another thanatological life writing subgenre has
been mostly overlooked by academics. This last death-related genre is far
less common (thankfully) than the death notice, and it rarely appears in
print. I am referring to the suicide note—the ultimate form, I suppose, of
autothanatography and the closest that autobiography comes to including
the death of the author. Like the narrative of assisted suicide, the suicide
note defends and justifies the act; it, too, constitutes an apologia. Unlike
the assisted-suicide narrative, however, the suicide note may also function
as an apology to survivors, such as family and friends—expressing regret
for causing them pain. Here again, life writing, understood inclusively,
contains an overlooked subgenre focused on the death of its author.
I can’t claim to have studied this subgenre. But I have some personal
experience with an instance of it. When my father died, in addition to
cache of documents I discovered in his closet, I found a number of notes
written on scraps of paper scattered around the house. When I finally
worked up the courage, thirty years after he died, to review the documents
and use them as the basis for a memoir, these texts were most resistant to
interpretation. They were obviously written by my father; his handwriting
is unmistakable. But unlike the correspondence in his closet, they lack
any addressee: evidently he wrote them to and for himself alone. They
were undated and so sketchy in their references that I cannot construct a
sequence out of them, the way I can with his letters. Some consist only of
lists—for example, of people he had admired; others contain quotations
he found comforting. So they defy incorporation in a narrative. But they
are distinctly autothanatological in two senses—or directions: some look
backward, reflecting on my mother’s recent death; others look forward,
reflecting on my father’s anticipated demise. There is no single “suicide
note” here. But I read the scraps collectively as notes toward a suicide—
an expression of what I describe as a slow-motion suicide with plausible
deniability. That is, the notes confirm to me that my father knew that his
drinking would end his life and he had resigned himself to that outcome,
without quite admitting that he was actively committing suicide—not
because he considered it a sin, but because it would have amounted to
giving up. Reading them as acknowledging his desire to die makes them
painful for me to read. But there is some comfort in them, as well: insofar
as he takes some responsibility for his death, he absolves me of my own
responsibility, my guilt.
My work, as reviewed here, has touched repeatedly, perhaps obsessively,
on death; it would appear that my career has indeed been morbid.
Though I never intended to focus on mortality, I cannot deny that there
is a mortiferous thread running through my work. But there is another
way to understand this preoccupation with death, other than as a way
of my working through personal issues by intellectualizing: as a function
of a more conscious concern for what I call the “work” of life writing. I
address this most explicitly in “The Work of Memoir,” the final chapter
of my last book, Memoir: An Introduction. The notion of “the work” of
life writing has to do with my sense that, as non-fiction, life writing has a
different relation to reality than fiction. I like to say that it exerts a kind
of leverage, or traction, on the world that fiction lacks. Americanists who
study life writing may be particularly attuned to work it does because of
the importance of genres like the slave narrative in our literary tradition
and our history. The project of slave narrative was simply to bring about
the abolition of slavery. Once that “work” was done after the Civil War,
the genre lost its raison d’être and dwindled to extinction, even though,
ironically, all ex-slaves were at liberty to write their stories: the genre’s
fulfillment was also its own annihilation.
But life writing has continued to perform important cultural and
political work. Although narratives of breast cancer and of HIV/AIDS
illnesses were prompted in part by the authors’ awareness of mortality,
they also were concerned with practices that marginalized women and
gay people, respectively. Most, then, constitute what we call counter-
discourse, and collectively these narratives helped to destigmatize the
illnesses that provoked them. Memoirs have also been vital to other
rights movements, such as the Civil Rights movement and the Disability
Rights movements.
Much, if not all, of my death-related work, then, can also be looked at
in terms of the work that the life writing does—from “prophecy” in my
dissertation, to defying death (in “The Shape of Death”), to harming the
dead (in the case of Grealy’s obituary), and reinforcing ableism (in the case
of euthanography). It is not always the case, then, that I endorse the work
of life writing. But I have long been arguing convinced that it is crucial to
understand what American life writing is doing. Often, and ideally, it is
advocating for minority rights and human rights more generally.
Note
1 It appears in this volume as Chapter 11.
Bibliography
Barnes, Elizabeth. The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. “The Shape of Death in American Autobiography.” The
Hudson Review 31(1), Spring 1978: 53–66. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. “Introduction: The Embodied Self.” Special Issue. “Illness,
Disability, and Life-Writing.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 6(1), Spring 1991:
1–7. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012. Print.
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Lucy Grealy, 39, Who Wrote a Memoir on Her
Disfigurement.” New York Times, 21 December 2002, B7. Print.
Singer, Peter. “Happy Nevertheless.” New York Times Magazine, 24 December
2008, 34. Print.
2 Introduction
The Work of Memoir*
In 2011, approaching my last sabbatical before the big sabbatical (my

retirement), I noticed a number of books being published—by prestigious
trade presses—with titles like How Fiction Works (Wood), How Novels
Work (Mullan), How to Read Novels Like a Professor (Foster)—and I
found myself wondering why no one had written a similar book on mem-
oir. After all, memoir was supposedly the hot genre. According to various
cultural commentators—critics, scholars, and reviewers—this was an age,
if not the age, of memoir. Memoir had eclipsed autobiography as the term
of choice for a certain kind of life narrative. More significantly, memoir
rivaled fiction in popularity and critical esteem and exceeded it in cul-
tural currency. As evidence, consider this statistic: “According to Neilsen
BookScan . . . between 2004 and 2008, total sales in the categories of
personal memoirs, childhood memoirs, and Parental Memoirs increased
more than 400 percent” (Yagoda 7). That was phenomenal growth, and I
suspect the trend has continued.
Now, I suspect that nearly everyone who buys a book with a title like
“how to read a novel like a professor” has already been shown how to
read fiction by a professor—or at least a high school teacher—whereas
nearly none of them has been taught how to read memoir. Because until
recently, memoir didn’t get much respect as a literary genre.
So after thinking that someone should write such a book, I decided
to take advantage of my leave to do it myself. And I did. If I could have
gotten away with it, I’d have called it Memoir for Dummies. But that
domain name, so to speak, was not available to me. I thought of calling
it Memoir: A User’s Manual, where “user” refers to writers as well as
readers. But my publisher, Oxford University Press, preferred the more
academic-sounding Memoir: An Introduction. So be it.
My talk today is not “from” the book, exactly. That is, little of it actually
appears in it. Rather, it’s an attempt to explain why the culminating
chapter has the title, “The Work of Memoir.” What’s up with that?
* I gave this talk as a Distinguished Faculty Lecture at Hofstra in 2011. In the

years since I have given variants of it under the title “Why Memoir Matters.”
Introduction 11
My two key words, work and memoir, are familiar to all of you. But
I’ll need to define both in the sense that I use them in order to elucidate
what I see as the distinctive relation between them.
Memoir first. Such a common word these days, and yet I admit that I
have written a whole (if short) book about a genre I cannot easily and
simply define. The problem—however—does not lie with me. Oh, no.
The problem never lies with me. (Ask my wife.) Rather, the problem lies
in the term’s history and its inconsistent and confusing usage. For one
thing, the term is used in both the singular and the plural to refer to a
single text: so “my memoirs” can denote one book, whereas “my novels”
would necessarily refer to more than one. Consider, too, that in French
the term has been both masculine and feminine in gender. We’re dealing,
apparently, with something that is indeterminate in number and in gender.
More to the point, though, the term has distinct meanings that actually
conflict. We make a sharp distinction between autobiography and biog-
raphy, as follows: Autobiography is about its author, whereas biography
is about someone else. Seems clear enough. But if you look up memoir in
a standard dictionary—I mean, not a dictionary of literary terms—you’ll
find definitions like these, from the American Heritage Dictionary:
1. An account of the personal experiences of the author.

2. An autobiography. [Pretty much the same as (1), wouldn’t you say?
Seems redundant rather than inconsistent.]
3. A biography or biographical sketch. [Whoops!]
According to the dictionary, then, memoir is either two distinct things, or

it’s one indistinct thing that straddles the line between autobiography and
biography. There’s just no getting around the fact that one of my key terms
can refer either to a species of autobiography or a species of biography.
But what kind of each? That’s not so easy to say, either. According to
some dictionaries, when memoir refers to a species of autobiography, it
denotes a relatively objective account of the author’s experiences. Tell that
to James Frey, whose “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, was discovered to
be quite unreliable, full of self-aggrandizing exaggerations. (He extended
a stay of a few hours in jail to one of several months—hardly a rounding
error.)
Now, I wish—I really do—that I could resolve all of these contradic-
tions for you—between the masculine and feminine, the plural and the
singular, the objective and the subjective, the biographical and the auto-
biographical senses of memoir. My life as a scholar and teacher would be
much simpler. But I can’t. But again, it’s not my fault.
What I can do is to remind you that the term’s root is French for
memory. Therein lies a helpful mnemonic. (That’s Greek for memory.) If
we think of memoir, then, as memory writing, the term’s ambiguity may
be less troubling. So while you can write a biography of anyone, living
12 Introduction
or dead, you can only write a memoir of someone you’ve known and
remember. And, similarly, one way to think about memoir as a species
of autobiography is to think of it as relying primarily on memory rather
than, say, documents or research. Since memory is a notoriously selective
and fallible faculty—and in my case, becoming more so with each passing
day—I think it’s helpful to think of memoir as subjective life writing,
whether about the author, about someone known to the author, or about
the relationship between them. That’s the best I can do for now.
Before I address the relationship between memoir and work, however, I
need to place memoir in a larger context—that of what we in the field call
“life writing.” Unfortunately, “life writing” is another problematic term.
When I meet strangers socially and they ask what I do for a living, I
sometimes admit to being an English professor. When I do, a common
follow-up is, “What’s your specialty?” If I respond, “life writing,” I am
almost always met by blank stares. So I’m not going to assume that
you all are familiar with this term, which has only recently become the
standard designation for what I have been studying since the 1970s.
Before I attempt to define it, let me list some things that constitute it,
and you’ll see the problem. My colleagues in the field and I consider all
of the following to count as life writing:
autobiography, biography, and memoir, including graphic mem-

oirs like Maus (Spiegelman), Fun Home (Bechdel), and Persepolis
(Satrapi);
diaries, journals, and letters;
biopics and bio-dramas—that is, movies and plays about real
people, like The King’s Speech;
documentary films about individuals or groups of people, like the
recent Babies and Restrepo;
birth announcements, marriage announcements, death notices
and obituaries;
college application essays, personal ads, and résumés;
scrapbooks (I hadn’t thought of the scrapbook as a life-writing
genre until a cousin of mine brought to a family reunion the first
three of ten bound volumes of his scrapbook, grandly entitled “The
Life and Times of William G. Couser”);
personal anecdotes and family stories—of which I just gave you
an example;
family albums and home movies;
magazines like People and Us;
the NPR radio show This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass;
StoryCorps©;
anything shown on the Biography channel, much of what is
shown on the Discovery Health channel, shows like Big World,
Little People (TLC), Hoarders (A&E), and Biggest Loser (NBC);
Introduction 13
personal email;
tweets;
Facebook pages;
last but not least, gossip—the original social medium.
This list is not exhaustive. It cannot be exhaustive. New forms are

springing up all over. After a recent talk, I was asked if there was any
musical life writing. At the time, I couldn’t think of any. But I was recently
reminded that the 1975 Maysles brothers documentary Grey Gardens
was adapted into a musical play in 2006. Voila: the bio-musical.
I trust my list demonstrates why the term life writing is problematic.
Some of my items—like memoir—are literary genres; most are not. Some
are written for publication; others, like diaries and letters, are not. Some,
like photo albums, are not even written. So I prefer the more inclusive
term life narrative. But even that is too restrictive; portraiture, which is
not really narrative, is now considered life writing. Life narrative is not
even limited to human subjects: Seabiscuit (Hillenbrand), a biography
of the celebrated race horse, and Marley and Me (Grogan), a memoir of
a bad dog, are both considered life writing. In fact, memoirs of pets are
currently multiplying like . . . gerbils.
So what we call life writing we should really call life representation.
Whichever term we use, it denotes anything that represents the identity
of actual (usually human) beings. The key criterion is that the subjects are
not invented. I make this point emphatically early on in the book, and I
quote: “Memoir is not fiction. Memoirs are not novels.”
This is the premise of my book. It’s not my thesis, because I don’t
intend to argue it. I consider it to be true by definition. But it’s my point
of departure. One reason I start there is that so many of my students—
even bright, serious students—will casually refer to memoirs as “novels.”
Which they are not. In my life-writing classes, novel is the other N-word,
never to be used to refer to the texts under discussion.
To repeat, as a nonfiction genre, memoir depicts the lives of real, not
imagined, individuals. But the line between fiction and nonfiction, novel
and memoir, is sometimes fuzzy, and it is sometimes purposely crossed.
One issue is what counts as “reality.” For example, there are in print a
number of memoirs of alien abduction, and there are at least two mem-
oirs in bookstores today recounting visits to heaven and back. We should
not be taken aback at this. For the memoir as we know it developed in
tandem with the novel; in English, at least, the two genres have enjoyed
a symbiotic relationship for some two hundred years. And they remain
intertwined. Today memoirs often incorporate invented or enhanced
material, and they often use novelistic techniques. Indeed, they are them-
selves a form of literary art, and their artifactuality—the sometimes
uneasy relation between their artfulness and their presumed factuality—
sometimes gets their authors into trouble. (Again, James Frey.)
14 Introduction
Conversely, novels often take the form of memoirs. In practice, it’s not
always easy to tell whether a particular narrative is realistic fiction or
memoir; there is no bright line between them. And of course, sometimes
fiction masquerades as—pretends to be—nonfiction.
Loosely speaking, both the novel and the memoir are “mimetic.”
That is, they imitate life in the sense that art is said to imitate nature.
Nevertheless, an important conceptual distinction obtains: memoir “pres-
ents”—and is therefore read—as a nonfictional record or re-presentation
of actual humans’ experience. Fiction does not; it creates its own lifelike
reality. And that makes all the difference.
Memoir’s commitment to the real doesn’t just limit its content (what
it can be about); it also limits its narrative techniques (how the content
can be presented). Thus, narrative omniscience is generally not found in
memoir. The rootedness of memoir in reality has ethical consequences,
too. The ethical obligations of the novel are few: not to plagiarize, and
not to libel. In contrast, the memoirist has complex ethical obligations:
to the historical record and, more important, to collaborators or subjects
who are represented in the text.
This special relation to the real affects what memoir can do, too, not
just what it is. In short, this distinction is fundamental both for how
memoir works (the craft of it) and for the work it does. What I mean by
the work of memoir, then, is not work as in “the work of art”—meaning
the product of the writer’s labor, nor that labor itself. Rather, it is work in
the sense of an act or deed, the effect of an agent or agency—the impact
of memoir on the world. When I discuss this, I find myself resorting to
physical metaphors, like leverage and traction.
The reason that I deferred the matter of work until I had placed
memoir in the larger category of what we call life writing is this: while
memoir and realistic fiction are often so similar as to be indistinguish-
able on the basis of internal evidence, memoir—unlike the novel—is the
literary form of something (life writing) that, in modern Western cul-
ture at least, most people are immersed in much of their lives. We write
our lives—or they are written for us—from birth to death and in some
cases beyond. Along the way, we produce, consume, or are represented
in many of the forms of life writing that I listed earlier. Facebook has
more than half a billion members worldwide; more than half of these
members log in every day. Twitter allows individuals to follow others’
lives in real time. Or so I’m told. I’m a Facebook and Twitter virgin. The
media and the genres available to us are proliferating faster than I, at
least, can keep up.
Life writing is not just some discrete thing(s) we do; it is a good part
of what defines us—how we become persons, develop and maintain our
identities. We live our lives by representing them. We grow up embedded
in, and inscribed by, a whole range of life-writing practices. And we do so
in more and more ways.
Introduction 15
So I would argue that the most significant thing that distinguishes
memoir from the novel is precisely this: memoir is the literary (or the
most literary) manifestation of a much larger set of practices that are
quite common—indeed, virtually unavoidable—in our daily lives today.
We are all sentenced for life, you might say. Have you seen the bumper
sticker that proclaims, “No Farms, No Food”? I’m tempted to make one
up that says, “No Life Writing, No Life.”
Having set memoir in this much larger context, I want to approach the
notion of the work of contemporary memoir with reference to some ear-
lier life-writing genres. I come to the study of memoir as an Americanist.
My doctorate is in American studies, rather than English, and I often feel
somewhat odd identifying myself as an “English professor.” It’s true that I
am a member of an “English Department,” but I’m not English and I don’t
teach British literature. I’m an American professor of American literature.
And the American back story of contemporary memoir is very dif-
ferent from its British counterpart. In Britain, in the eighteenth century,
the novel and the memoir emerged and developed side by side. I like
to say that they grew up like siblings constantly borrowing each oth-
er’s clothes—to the extent that they were sometimes hard to tell apart.
Eighteenth-century British fiction not only resembled memoir—true life
stories; it was often presented as if it was such.
On this side of the Atlantic, the novel developed much later for various
reasons. As a result, if you examine an anthology of pre-Revolutionary
American literature, most of what you find is what we now call life writing.
There are narratives of exploration—firsthand accounts of voyages sent
back to Europe to encourage further exploration and settlement; subse-
quently and consequently, there are narratives of settlement, like William
Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation; subsequently and consequently, there
are narratives of Indian captivity. In New England, Puritanism produced
lots of conversion narratives. In areas colonized by the Spanish, there
are eyewitness accounts of the ruthless conquest and exploitation of the
natives. And so on.
By comparison with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British litera-
ture, much of this doesn’t look very literary; there is no drama, no fiction.
And most of it, by later standards, is not “literature”—that is, it’s not
“imaginative” writing. By the standards of the day, however, it was litera-
ture. More to the point here, it was doing important and necessary work.
Most of these life-writing genres are utilitarian and instrumental. They
are written to have a relatively direct effect on the world. Most advance
the project of colonizing the New World; some resist it. Either way, they
were not written for aesthetic ends but for practical ones.
These genres grow out of distinctive conditions of colonial life. And
each is dedicated to one task. Some, like the conversion narrative,
are built into particular institutions; for a time American Puritanism
required aspiring church members to present a compelling narrative of
16 Introduction
their conversion. It was a way of preserving the sanctity of the sacrament
of communion.
To move on to the nineteenth century, the work that the slave narrative
did was to witness and indict the injustice of the “peculiar institution”; its
purpose was to destroy the institution that gave rise to it. It is thus that rare
thing: an ad hoc genre. If successful, it puts itself out of business, so to speak.
And in fact, it went into steep decline after the Civil War as the number of
potential slave narrators—who of necessity had to be free—skyrocketed.
I’d like to move from these early, instrumental life-writing genres to the
contemporary memoir, using as a pivotal figure Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau was not exactly a memoirist, but he was first and foremost a
lifelong life writer. He was a faithful keeper of a journal, and his posthu-
mously published journals run to sixteen printed volumes. He scoured
those journals for material for his essays, another form of life writing.
And also for his longer narratives, which took two complementary forms:
the journey (The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers) and the sojourn, Walden.
To call Walden a sojourn—an account of a temporary residence—is
accurate but inadequate. When I teach it, I am at pains to read it as revis-
ing and updating colonial life-writing genres with which Thoreau was
familiar. First, the narrative of exploration: Thoreau literally surveyed his
surroundings but, significantly, with no commercial designs on the land.
Second, the narrative of settlement: he clears land to erect his dwelling and
plant crops—ironically, only a short walk from a bustling town center.
However, the indigenous genre that he is most pointedly revising is the
slave narrative. The most radical gesture of this multidimensional narra-
tive is his presenting it as a white slave narrative:
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say,

as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude
called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that
enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer;
it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the
slave-driver of yourself.
This audacious claim, potentially offensive in its seeming dismissal of

Negro slavery, comes just before his oft-quoted line: “The mass of men
lead lives of quiet desperation.” It is well to remember that Thoreau was
in fact an ardent abolitionist. But he saw that the abolition of “Negro
slavery” would leave in place a far more common form of slavery: that of
everyman to his material possessions. And his experiment at Walden was
meant to test ways of escaping that common institution, which of course
persists to this day. The work of Walden was to model a way of life that
Thoreau believed was truer to American ideals than that surrounding
him in antebellum America.
Introduction 17
What is most innovative about Walden as life writing is the element of
self-experimentation. Walden is the first book I can think of that involved
the deliberate, temporary modification of the author’s life with the inten-
tion of writing up the experiment afterward. This involves a quan-
tum leap in life writing: a new kind of life is imagined, tried out, then
recounted and justified. There is creativity in the very conception of a life
truly worth living. And with Thoreau, we have a life writer who married
the highest literary art to ambitious goals. With Thoreau, I would say,
American life writing reaches parity with literary genres like the novel.
We may now fast-forward 150 years from the publication of Walden
in 1854. Around the turn of the millennium, there was a resurgence of
life writing involving short-term living experiments. Some of it is devoted
to carrying out rather odd and extreme experiments—reading the entire
Encyclopedia Britannica, or cooking your way through Julia Child’s clas-
sic French cookbook, in a year, for example. Because these projects are
sometimes arch and trivial, this niche genre has been dubbed “shtick lit.” I
prefer to call it stunt memoir. But I don’t mean to dismiss these narratives,
which can be transgressive and transformative. In their attempts to live
green lives, some of these memoirists are direct descendants of Thoreau.
A notable example is Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man: Adventures of a
Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries
He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process (2009).
Similarly, Morgan Spurlock’s documentary film, Supersize Me, recounts
his self-imposed regimen of eating McDonald’s food for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner for a month, supersizing each meal when invited to. Examples
like this hearken back to Thoreau in their eschewal of materialism and
mass consumerism. Indeed, I have come to think of Walden retrospec-
tively as Minimize Me.
What we consider literary memoir today is rarely this instrumental. But
a key criterion distinguishing discrete subgenres of memoir is precisely
what they do. And there is more instrumentalism in even literary memoir
than you might think—especially if we consider the personal as well as
the social work; the private as well as the public functions.
Critics today like to distinguish between the somebody memoir and the
nobody memoir, where the distinction is between memoirs by people who
are already famous, like George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld—to name
two contemporary memoirists—or movie stars or athletes, and memoirs by
hitherto anonymous individuals, like Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s
Ashes (1996). Let’s take the somebody memoir first.
It has become de rigueur for contemporary candidates for high office
to write memoirs, to co-write them, or to have them ghost-written to
advance their campaigns and their political careers. These are clearly
instrumental memoirs. If they are successful, the candidates’ careers in
office are often—pardon the pun—bookended by memoirs: today, gov-
ernment officials—from the President on down at least to the Cabinet
18 Introduction
level—are pretty much guaranteed fat memoir contracts once they leave
office, pretty much regardless of their performance in office.
Such memoirs universally take the form of apologia, the Latin term for
what we call apology in English. One reason to use the Latin term is that,
contrary to our everyday use of the English word, in lit-crit terminology, an
apology is not an admission of wrongdoing (that’s another genre, the con-
fession). Rather, apology trades in self-defense and self-justification. Recent
examples are former President George W. Bush’s Decision Points (2010)
and Donald Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown (2011). Jon Stewart wittily
opened an interview with Rumsfeld by preemptively declaring, “Apology
accepted”—the point being that of course Rumsfeld had hardly apologized
in his memoir. On the contrary. He moved directly from the Department
of Defense to that of self-defense. Like W., he vigorously sought to justify
his policies and decisions. Mistakes may have been made, but not by them.
In Decision Points, however, President Bush went so far as to acknowl-
edge that he had authorized waterboarding—which is considered torture
under international law. This prompted a Facebook movement encourag-
ing people to go to bookstores and move the book from the Biography/
Memoir section to the True Crime section—political protest in the form
of genre reassignment. This segment of the public seeks to obstruct, or
subvert, the work that Decision Points is trying to carry out. It may be
an unusual circumstance, but it reminds us that genres are implicit agree-
ments between writers and readers; they are interactive, and readers are
not compelled to accept the terms of the generic pact.
With nobody memoirs, the agenda of the memoir may be less obvious,
and utilitarianism may vary inversely with aesthetic ambition, but it
is hardly absent. Based on a sample of more than 200 recent nobody
memoirs, the novelist and critic Lorraine Adams claimed that almost all
fall into one of three types:
The largest by far is the childhood memoir—incestuous, abusive,

alcoholic, impoverished, minority, “normal,” and the occasional priv-
ileged. The second largest type is the memoir of physical catastro-
phe—violence, quadriplegia, amputation, disease, death. The third
is mental catastrophe—madness, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia,
brain damage.
(Adams 2002)
My own contribution here has been to point out that the nobody
memoir is often the memoir of some body (two words). That is, it is
often concerned with what it’s like to inhabit, or to be, a particular
body. Note that Adams’s latter two categories—physical catastrophe and
mental catastrophe—are more or less congruent with two kinds of dis-
ability. Nobody memoirs are often odd body memoirs—or, if you prefer,
odd-body-ographies.
Introduction 19
Although this has generally not been acknowledged by mainstream crit-
ics, the memoir boom has coincided with, if not been impelled by, the rise
of the disability memoir. Lucy Grealy literally embodied the nobody/some
body memoirist. Starting out as a poet, she was little known before she pub-
lished Autobiography of a Face in 1994. From its title on, Autobiography
of a Face is concerned with living with a body disfigured initially by cancer
of the jaw, which Grealy suffered as a child, and later by dozens of recon-
structive surgeries, which required transplanting bone and flesh from other
parts of her body to her face. Perhaps more than any other, Grealy’s book
established the commercial and literary potential of the disability memoir.
One aspect of the emergence of the some body memoir is that many
diseases or disabilities, some quite obscure, have generated small num-
bers of narratives. Some of these conditions are of relatively recent vin-
tage, as modern biomedicine continues to generate diagnostic labels and
to pathologize human variation; others, though long known, have never
before been represented in nonscientific nonfiction, i.e., in life writing.
In this latter category of conditions are amputation, amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease, anorexia and other eating disorders,
asthma, bipolar illness, borderline personality disorder, cerebral palsy,
chronic fatigue syndrome, cystic fibrosis, deformity, diabetes, epilepsy,
insomnia, locked-in syndrome, multiple sclerosis, Munchausen syndrome
by proxy, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Parkinson’s, prosopag-
nosia (or face-blindness), schizophrenia, stuttering, stroke, and Tourette
syndrome.
A complementary aspect of this trend is that a few conditions have
generated large numbers of narratives. In my 1997 book Recovering
Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing, I surveyed four such con-
ditions—breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, deafness, and paralysis. I could eas-
ily have included three more: blindness, depression, and autism—four,
if you consider addiction a medical illness or a disability. One way to
understand the sudden surge in accounts of these conditions is against the
background of civil rights movements of the last quarter of the twentieth
century. Just as what we sometimes call the civil rights movement was
accompanied by the proliferation and prominence of African American
autobiography, the women’s liberation movement had much to do with
the emergence of breast cancer narratives. When my mother had breast
cancer in the early 1960s, not a single published narrative was available
to instruct or comfort her; the same would have been true a decade later.
But narratives of breast cancer proliferated in the 1980s; this was a func-
tion not of medical, but of political, progress: women began to assert
control over their own bodies and over their stories.
Similarly, HIV/AIDS narratives have both reflected and advanced the
gay rights movement; a disease that simultaneously killed and outed so
many gay men in the U.S. inevitably manifested itself in life writing as
well as in more overtly political forms.
20 Introduction
It should be obvious that the emergence of the disability memoir is
related to the disability rights movement, but it’s rarely acknowledged, for
the movement has gone unnoticed by much of the public. Nevertheless,
it has been enormously significant. Its landmark accomplishment in the
United States was the passage, in 1990, of the Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA), a civil rights law that banned discrimination against people
with disabilities. (After nearly two decades of erosion by legal challenges,
its original intent was reaffirmed by Congress in the ADA Amendments
Act in 2008.) As disabled people have become more visible in the public
sphere, increasing publication of their lives should come as no surprise.
And the work that these memoirs do collectively is to demystify and to
destigmatize the conditions they represent.
I want to conclude by suggesting that we compare the set of the sub-
jects of memoirs to the set of subjects contained in a reference work
like the Dictionary of American Biography. Subjects included in such dic-
tionaries are by definition somebodies—people who played meaningful
roles on the public stage. As such dictionaries grow older and are revised
and updated, the diversity of their subjects increases—more women, for
example—but the criterion of inclusion remains the same. In comparison,
the set of subjects of memoirs is far more diverse, because they do not
have to be somebodies to begin with. And this suggests to me that, col-
lectively, memoir can play a democratizing role in our culture, bringing
more and more lives—and kinds of lives—to light. And so I would say it
deserves the accolade William Dean Howells gave it late in the nineteenth
century, when he dubbed it “the most democratic province in the republic
of letters.”
Works Cited
Adams, Lorraine. “Almost Famous: The Rise of the ‘Nobody’ Memoir.”
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Beavan, Colin. No Impact Man: Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to
Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of
Life in the Process. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Print.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner, 2007.
Print.
Bradford, William. Of Plimoth Plantation. Boston: Wright and Potter, 1901. Print.
Bush, George W. Decision Points. New York: Crown, 2010. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012. Print.
Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration
of the World's Favorite Literary Form. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.
Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Print.
Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Print.
Introduction 21
Grogan, John. Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog. New
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Print.
Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. New York: Riverhead, 2009. Print.
3 Quality-of-Life Writing
Illness, Disability, and
Contemporary American
Memoir*
Let me begin at the beginning, with my title. “Quality-of-life writing”

is a term I coined around 2007 for an essay I wrote for an MLA vol-
ume, Teaching Life Writing Texts (Couser). Obviously, I simply fused two
existing terms, life writing and quality of life, to form a new one. In what
follows, I’ll explain why I thought this might be a useful addition to the
critical lexicon.
I don’t need to define “life writing” for you. But I want to say a little
about the term from the perspective of someone who’s been in the field
for a long time; some of this may be news to those starting out. My
doctorate is in American studies, and my 1977 dissertation was titled
“American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode.” Autobiography was
the term of art then; in fact, autobiography was just beginning to be
studied and analyzed as a significant literary genre.
Biography had long been studied, mostly by students of history and
by biographers themselves. The still premier journal in the field, founded
in 1978 at the University of Hawai‘i, is called, somewhat misleadingly,
Biography. Of course, etymologically, biography means life writing, but
most of us think of the term as referring to a single genre, the flagship
of the fleet, so to speak. In the 1970s biography was the prestigious life-
writing genre, and the journal focused on it.
This was so much the case that after a pioneering conference at
Louisiana State University in 1984, hosted by James Olney, a group of
young scholars decided that autobiography needed its own journal. The
founders hedged their bets a bit, deciding to call it a/b: Auto/Biography
Studies. It was begun on a shoestring but is now mature and well-
respected. As the field developed, even this hybrid title seemed too restric-
tive: scholars began to broaden their inquiries from long-form published
life narratives to shorter, less formal genres. The name of the Australian
journal Life Writing, founded in 2004, reflects this. Indeed, in the age of
the selfie, the very term “writing” has become obsolete. New journals,
* I gave this lecture to a group of faculty and graduate students in Medical

Humanities at Kings College, London, in May 2019.
Quality-of-Life Writing 23
some online only, have been created to serve the increasing interest in
non-, pre-, or post-print modes of life narrative.
So much for literary terminology (for now).
The term “quality of life” comes from a different context, the field of
medicine, especially public health. In that field, the term is qualified thus:
health-related quality of life, abbreviated as HRQOL.
The website of the US Center for Disease Control (or CDC) has this to
say about HRQOL:
The concept of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and its deter-

minants have evolved since the 1980s to encompass those aspects
of overall quality of life that can be clearly shown to affect health—
either physical or mental. On the individual level, HRQOL includes
physical and mental health perceptions (e.g., energy level, mood) and
their correlates—including health risks and conditions, functional
status, social support, and socioeconomic status.
The passage goes on to discuss HRQOL of groups and communities and

to affirm the value of “surveilling” whole populations with an eye to
preventing disease and optimizing public health. (https://www.cdc.gov/
hrqol/concept.htm#3 accessed 8 October 2019)
In medicine, the notion of quality of life is supposed to shift the focus
from merely objective data, what can be observed through various medi-
cal technologies, to subjective values that elude such devices. In practice,
however, common instruments for assessing HRQOL often constitute
questionnaires that look like this:
By placing a tick in one box in each group below, please indicate

which statements best describe your own health state today.
Mobility
I have no problems in walking about □
I have some problems in walking about □
I am confined to bed □
Self-Care
I have no problems with self-care □
I have some problems washing or dressing myself □
I am unable to wash or dress myself □
Usual Activities (e.g. work, study, housework, family or leisure
activities)
I have no problems with performing my usual activities □
I have some problems with performing my usual activities □
I am unable to perform my usual activities □
Pain/Discomfort
I have no pain or discomfort □
I have moderate pain or discomfort □
I have extreme pain or discomfort □
Anxiety/ Depression
I am not anxious or depressed □
I am moderately anxious or depressed □
I am extremely anxious or depressed □
This form then asks participants to mark their QOL on a scale from 100
(best imaginable health state) to 0 (worst imaginable health state).
You may already see the problem with such questionnaires. They may
be of use in surveying the QOL of large populations. But for individuals,
I think they are woefully inadequate, even insidious.
Why so? For starters, while they purport to assess something quali-
tative, the instruments are implicitly quantitative. The boxes are not
assigned scores, but they are obviously ranked. One could assign values
to each (1, 2, 3, or 0, 1, 2); totaling the answers would yield what might
be regarded as a single numerical index of one’s HRQOL. Furthermore,
such questionnaires imply that these are the only factors to be considered
in locating oneself on the continuum. Finally, although the “perceptions”
elicited are those of the individuals surveyed, subjects are given only a
limited number of aspects of their lives to rate. I’ll return to the impor-
tance of this later, but if we compare this survey to the text from the
CDC above, we can see that the focus here is only on “functional status.”
“Social support” and “socioeconomic status” are omitted.
In any case, well into my decades-long study of narratives of illness and
disability, I coined the term quality-of-life writing to describe narratives
that challenge this very narrow view of quality. I’ll explore this more fully
in a bit. But first, let me explain the “disability paradox.”
In survey after survey—presumably not using instruments like the one
I just analyzed—disabled people rate their quality of life almost as highly
as nondisabled people rate theirs. That, in short, is the disability paradox:
that disabled people report their QOL nearly as highly as nondisabled
people report theirs. Such reports simply defy “common sense.” Don’t
disabled people know their QOL is lower than that of otherwise similar
individuals? Are they in denial, self-deluded, ignorant? Lying to save face?
Now, although there’s a very small gap between the subjective
reports of QOL by nondisabled and disabled people, there is a sig-
nificant gap between the estimates by nondisabled people of disabled
people’s QOL and their own reports of it; in other words, there’s a
significant discrepancy between the inside and the outside views of the
QOL of disabled people. (It would be misleading to describe this as a
discrepancy between the subjective and the objective, for reasons I hope
to establish.)
Furthermore, nondisabled health care professionals render even lower
estimates of the quality of life of disabled people than the general non-
disabled population. And one of the major obstacles to the delivery of
health care to disabled people is this well-established disparity between
the reports of their quality of life by disabled people and the estimates of
their quality of life by medical professionals.
I will refer hereafter to this discrepancy between high first-person
reports and low third-person estimates of the quality of life of disabled
people simply as “the gap”. Since medical professionals are after all—or
above all—dedicated to the improvement of physical and mental well-
being, they might be expected to devalue states of impairment and illness.
So the gap may not be surprising. But it is disturbing; more than that, it’s
dangerous.
For example, I have heard reports of DNR (“do not resuscitate”)
orders being inscribed on the charts of people with disabilities without
their knowledge, much less their permission. My late friend and colleague
William Peace, an anthropologist and longtime paraplegic, was informed
soon after his admission to a hospital for complications of a pressure
wound that his physician could “make him comfortable” if he wished
to decline aggressive treatment. Bill’s response was to make sure that his
physician knew that he had a PhD and to ensure that he had frequent
visitors—which is to say, he sought to establish that he had intellectual
and social capital his physician assumed he lacked. Bill was fortunate
to be able to attest in this way to his QOL. One worries, though, about
people who lack such collateral assets to offset their disability in the eyes
of their “care-givers.”
So the gap can have life-or-death consequences in the delivery of health
care to people with disabilities. At the beginning of life, the gap may create
a bias toward the selective abortion of fetuses with detected abnormali-
ties. Indeed, a number of bioethicists, the most notorious of whom is Peter
Singer, have used presumptions of low quality of life to justify biomedical
programs to reduce the population of disabled individuals (Amundson 3).
At the end of life, this gap may create a bias toward assisted suicide for
the disabled.
In order to explore the troubling implications of this gap, let me intro-
duce the fundamental, if somewhat counterintuitive, distinction made in
disability studies between impairment and disability. Traditionally, dis-
ability has been viewed under the “medical paradigm,” which patholo-
gizes anomalies in the body (even when, as with short stature, they are
not health-related or functional problems). Medicine seeks to identify,
diagnose, explain these anomalies to prevent or correct them.
Disability studies deploys a complementary paradigm; under the “social
paradigm,” somatic anomalies are not seen as inherently problematic, infe-
rior, or pathological. Rather, they are understood as culturally constructed;
moreover, the focus is not on the individual body but on the fit between
the body and the environment. The social paradigm thus supports activ-
ism aimed at reforming society to minimize disadvantages posed by the
environment to people with unusual bodies. Under this paradigm, “impair-
ment” is found in the body, “disability” in the often-hostile environment.
The classic example of this distinction is that paraplegia, found in the
body, is an “impairment.” Unable, as yet, to cure spinal-cord injury, the
medical paradigm offers prosthetic devices like wheelchairs, which enable
mobility. A paraplegia’s “disability,” however, is found in an environment
lacking elevators or ramps, which limits the mobility of the wheelchair
user. The social paradigm addresses that deficiency by advocating for an
accessible environment. As I said earlier, the two paradigms are comple-
mentary, rather than opposed.
I hope you can see already how this applies to the HRQOL instrument
discussed earlier. While it invites the perspective of the respondents, it
addresses only their bodies. And it limits the criteria for quality of life
to a few basic considerations. It thus reflects the medical, rather than the
social, paradigm.
My thinking about all of this has been stimulated and shaped by an
article called “Quality of Life, Disability, and Hedonic Psychology,” by a
disabled philosopher, Ron Amundson. Hedonics is the study of the sub-
jective experience of pleasure or happiness. It may sound touchy-feely,
but it is an experimental field yielding empirical results. The results of
hedonics studies are sometimes quite counterintuitive, which makes them
all the more interesting. It finds, for example, that most people are not
very good predictors of what will make them—or others—happy. For
example, most people think that a major positive life change, like hitting
the lottery, will make them very happy. It may, but not as much as they
expect, and not for long.
Hedonics explains this in terms of various psychological mechanisms.
Hedonics finds that the psyche is remarkably resilient: it generally main-
tains an emotional homeostasis through life’s ups and downs, adjusting
to radical changes in personal circumstances. The bad news is that win-
ning the lottery doesn’t make you very happy for very long; the good
news is that suddenly acquiring a significant impairment, like paralysis,
need not make you unhappy for long, either.
What matters here is that hedonics helps to validate and explain dis-
abled people’s surprisingly high reports of their quality of life. That is, it
resolves the “disability paradox.” In my view, this corroboration consti-
tutes a real advance in the study of disability—a truly big deal. Ideally,
dissemination of these findings would reduce the gap between nondis-
abled people’s estimates of the QOL of disabled individuals and their
own reports of that QOL.
We now return to life writing—because these findings provide a new
argument for the value of nonclinical narratives of illness and disability.
This argument hinges on a psychological phenomenon called the focus-
ing illusion (Amundson 8–9). This comes into play when experimental
subjects have their attention directed to a single factor when rating qual-
ity of life. For example, one experiment asked students to rate their qual-
ity of life and their recent dating frequency. Half were asked about dating
first; half were asked about their overall quality of life first. For the group
focused on dating, quality of life was strongly correlated with dating fre-
quency. For the other group, the two results were quite independent. The
implication, of course, is that the first group overestimated the relevance
of dating to their overall quality of life because their minds had been
focused on that single factor. Hence, the term focusing illusion.
Similarly, when nondisabled people are asked to estimate the quality
of life of a disabled person, the very question supplies a focus that skews
the result: they are asked to rate the quality of life of someone about
whom they know only that they are disabled. In contrast, when a dis-
abled person is asked to report their own quality of life, the response is
multifactorial, holistic, and thus more positive. Significantly, the same is
true when the estimator is a friend, a partner, or a close relative of the
disabled person.
The focusing illusion also applies to our HRQOL survey form. When
individuals fill out this form, they are led to evaluate their QOL only
in terms already presented to them, perceptions of their somatic state.
Nothing is asked about their social, cultural, and political environment,
which can profoundly affect their overall QOL.
The researchers cited by Amundson concluded, “the less you know
about paraplegics, the worse off you think they are” (Schkade and
Kahneman, qtd. in Amundson 386).
Now, the next best thing to knowing someone with a disability may be
knowing their story. Hence the value of what I call quality-of-life writing,
narratives by people with significant illnesses and disabilities that render
their experience subjectively and holistically and which, increasingly (in
the US, at least), deploy the social paradigm.
Until quite recently in Western culture, high or low, the subjectivity of
disabled people has rarely been foregrounded, rarely understood in depth
and in full context. But if we turn from poetry, fiction, drama, and film
to nonfiction, especially to life writing, we find a counterdiscursive move-
ment over at least the last half-century, culminating in the current “mem-
oir boom.” Like other marginalized groups, disabled people have much to
gain from taking the means of literary production into their own hands.
But this is a fraught and precarious move. In everyday life, disabled
people are considered responsible for self-narration as examples of mis-
fortune, and are often asked bluntly by complete strangers: “What hap-
pened to you?” To this question, the desired answer is one that offers a
medical diagnosis or a story somehow reassuring to the inquisitor. Like
other minorities historically represented largely by members of domi-
nant groups, disabled people come to literary production from within
the same culture that marginalizes them; they are vulnerable to infec-
tion with the very prejudices that oppress them. Thus, disabled people
come to life writing from a position of pre-inscription: they are already
known as defective, deficient, interpellated as fundamentally other. In life
writing, their charge is to undo, and/or overwrite, their prior representa-
tion: to offer compelling counter-representation. The challenge is to do
this without deploying rhetorics already in circulation that simply rein-
force stigma or condescension. Furthermore, unlike other marginalized
statuses, disability may interfere with, or even preclude, self-narration;
for disabled people, self-representation may involve obstacles not faced
by gender, racial, or ethnic minorities.
In North America, successive rights movements—the civil rights move-
ment, the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement—were
accompanied by discrete memoir booms. These memoir booms did not
merely parallel the rights movements; they advanced them. There was a
reciprocal relationship between the political and the literary. As rights
movements expanded the audience for minority memoirs, counterdiscur-
sive life writing reinforced the political critiques being made by rights
advocates. In the 1990s, there was an upsurge in narratives of HIV/AIDS
and of breast cancer—each niche genre being linked to a respective rights
movement. Similarly, a spike in the number of disability memoirs accom-
panied the disability rights movement, whose major achievement was the
passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
The critic Lorraine Adams observed a fundamental distinction between
“somebody memoirs” (written by celebrities) and “nobody memoirs”
(written by individuals who were not hitherto public figures). Somebody
memoirs have the advantage of a preexisting audience: the narrative is a
consequence of and a capitalization on their fame. In contrast, nobody
memoirs have to earn their audiences on their own merits: if their previ-
ously anonymous authors achieve fame, it is a function of their stories
attracting readers. Piggy-backing on Adams’s distinction, I coined the
term “some body memoirs” to denote nonfiction narratives of living in,
with, or as an anomalous body. (A more technical term for these would
be autosomatographies.)
These can be sorted roughly into two categories. On the one hand, a
few conditions—such as breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, blindness, deafness, and
recently depression—have generated many narratives. The cultural “selec-
tion” of these conditions is worth investigation, because it is not the case
that the most deadly and dangerous conditions produce the most narra-
tives. If it were, women would write more narratives of lung cancer than of
breast cancer. Similarly, there are relatively few narratives of common con-
ditions like heart disease or diabetes. Obviously, other factors are at work:
breast cancer in women is memoir-worthy because it affects an organ
closely associated with beauty, sexual desirability, and female identity. And
it was not merely the virulence of HIV/AIDS but its association with early
death in gay men that accounted for so many narratives being written.
On the other hand, numerous conditions have generated a few narra-
tives each. Over the years I kept an ever-lengthening list of conditions,
some quite rare, that produced small numbers of memoirs. The literary
marketplace seems to have room for a vast array of such conditions.
Recently, I co-edited a two-volume reference work entitled Disability
Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives
(Couser and Mintz). It contains individual treatments of 200 such narra-
tives of nearly 100 distinct conditions. And the book does not claim to be
exhaustive. So, today, at least in North America, having an unusual impair-
ment or illness is considered an appropriate basis for a full-length memoir.
In the internet age, the ease, decreased cost, and increasing respectability
of self-publishing all encourage such testimony. And of course, beyond
the realm of print, there is cyberspace, which hosts blogs, online support
groups, and other forms of self-representation. As a result, disability life
writing proliferated dramatically around the turn of the millennium.
In addition to mirroring the disability rights movement, however, the
incidence of disability narrative also reflects the public’s fears: a distin-
guishing feature of disability is that it constitutes the only minority that
members of the majority can join at any time. Disability is often treated
as though it were communicable in the medical sense: kept at a psy-
chological distance for fear that it might contaminate the “healthy” and
unimpaired. Insofar as it may disarm irrational fears of disability, the
contemporary boom in disability life writing should be welcomed. But
the relation between disability memoir and the impulse to “quarantine”
disability is somewhat problematic.
The production of their own first-person nonfictional narratives is
certainly a key development in the history of disabled people, but it is
far from an uncomplicated phenomenon. As I have suggested earlier,
pre-inscription challenges disabled memoirists to undermine common
preconceptions about disability; unfortunately, some disability memoirs
seem instead to offer (false) reassurance to the nondisabled. In Signifying
Bodies, my book on disability and contemporary life writing, I identified
several common rhetorical patterns in disability memoir that do just that,
or mostly that (Chapter 3). One is what I call the rhetoric of triumph, as
manifested in the popularity, and thus the prevalence, of narratives of
overcoming. Whereas disabled protagonists in Western drama and fic-
tion are often subjected to scorn, destruction (including self-destruction),
and/or sentimental condescension, disabled memoirs tend to have comic
plots that recount their protagonists’ triumph over adversity. Narratives
that offer up unlikely supercrips (a disparaging term for disabled people
who overcompensate for their supposed deficiencies) are often referred to
disparagingly by disabled people as “inspiration porn” because in life, as
distinct from life writing, such triumph is the exception rather than the
rule. But narratives of overcoming disability are particularly valued in the
literary marketplace.
Narratives of overcoming are insidious not only because they grossly
misrepresent the real world, in which poverty and unemployment are
endemic among disabled people, but also because they suggest that the
environment is not so hostile that an impaired person cannot succeed
through sheer determination. After all, what is overcome in such nar-
ratives is usually not what disability scholars call disability, but rather
impairment. The protagonist/narrator manages to achieve something
thought unlikely or impossible for a person with a particular condition:
the blind person climbs Everest; the one-armed boy grows up to be a
major league baseball pitcher. The plot of overcoming seems calculated
to reassure, not others with the same impairment, who know all too
well what they are up against, but rather the nondisabled, whose fear of
disability may be somehow assuaged, at least temporarily, by best-case
scenarios. In short, the overcoming memoir is not counterdiscursive: its
message is that things are all right as they are. The disabled can succeed
like the nondisabled if only they have sufficient grit.
One of the significant developments of the last several decades has
been the development of more subversive narrative methods in disability
memoir. One, borrowed from gay and lesbian narrative, is the story of
coming out, of owning and affirming one’s identity as a disabled person.
This scenario appeals to those whose status may be liminal: those with
impairments invisible to casual observers, or mild enough to be hidden
or masked. Here, the link between disability narrative and the disability
rights movement is evident, in a couple of ways. First, as the movement
asserts that disabled people merit equal rights, it implicitly encourages
openness about one’s identity. Second, the public-ation (literally, the mak-
ing public) of one’s story alters the dynamic between the disabled and the
nondisabled. Coming out, making oneself “visible” as disabled, troubles
the easy division of people into two distinct categories. Making nondis-
abled readers realize that they already live comfortably among people
with quite significant, though imperceptible, impairments can thwart the
othering of disabled people.
Contrary to narrative patterns that remove stigma from the individual
while leaving it in place for the condition, the coming-out story in effect
exposes the arbitrariness of the stigma by affirming the condition that
it is attached to. The coming-out story changes the landscape in which
most of us live. Further, emerging in print from the disability closet can
encourage others with disabilities to come out. As it happens, among
recent coming-out memoirs have been narratives by significant figures in
disability studies: for example, Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen (1999)
and Stephen Kuusisto’s Planet of the Blind (1997). In these narratives, life
writing and advocacy merge.
Another counterdiscursive pattern is the narrative of emancipation.
Here, coming out may be literal rather than figurative, as in leaving a
custodial institution. One such is I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes (1989),
by Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer, a woman so severely disabled by cere-
bral palsy that she has never been able to walk, feed herself, or speak.
Institutionalized by a family unable to afford a private hospital, she was
assumed by medical staff to be cognitively impaired and, in effect, ware-
housed. She eventually succeeded in communicating nonverbally to the
extent that the staff recognized her intelligence and, after a long struggle,
she was able to move out of the institution and to live on her own with
assistance—autonomously, though not independently—and to marry.
As my term emancipation suggests, this subgenre has much in common
with slave narratives. There, inequality is ascribed on the basis of race;
here, on the basis of impairment. What makes stories like Sienkiewicz-
Mercer’s particularly valuable is that they assert equality and demand
freedom despite the undeniable dysfunction of the bodies in question. Her
freedom and autonomy depend on the recognition that her impairment
does not justify unequal treatment, let alone involuntary confinement.
The production of this narrative illustrates an issue alluded to earlier:
cognitive, neurological, and physical impairments may make it difficult
or impossible for disabled people to speak for themselves, much less to
represent themselves in print. In cases like Sienkiewicz-Mercer’s, however,
assistive technology and human collaboration can empower the aspiring
memoirist. The production of her narrative involved an advocate, Steven
B. Kaplan, who prompted her with questions; she responded with the
help of word boards, and he would then sketch out a narrative and sub-
mit it to her for her approval.
Methods like these, while complicated, labor-intensive, and time-consum-
ing, do not compromise the validity of the narrative: as long as the “author”
can “authorize” their text by reading and approving it, the narrative should
be worthy of trust. It is unfair to subject memoirists with impaired com-
munication to more scrutiny than is applied to nondisabled memoirists;
after all, celebrity memoirists often deploy ghostwriters (typically with far
less transparency). Significantly, during the current memoir boom, a period
characterized by several highly publicized fraudulent memoirs involving
false claims of victimhood—usually that of a Holocaust survivor—I am not
aware of the discrediting of a single published disability memoir.
That is not to say, however, that disability memoir entails no ethical
problems. To the contrary, disabled people are among the subjects most
vulnerable to exploitation when the text is not in their control and they
are not able to assess and respond to their representation. In everyday
life, the term “memoir” is often used interchangeably with “autobiog-
raphy,” but as the prefix suggests, autobiography must be self-authored,
whereas memoir can be written by anyone acquainted with the subject.
And therein lies an ethical issue. Before the current memoir boom, one of
the most common forms of disability memoir was the parental memoir of
the disabled child, and this genre continues to be popular.
Obviously, no child is in control of a parental memoir, but few non-
disabled children are the subjects of such memoirs. Disabled children
are doubly disadvantaged, by their junior status and by their disabil-
ity; they are especially vulnerable subjects. Parents’ motives are usually
noble: to “raise awareness” of a disability, to influence public policy, to
celebrate a life lived in adverse circumstances. But there is always the
danger that the disabled child will be presented as a parental nightmare.
Such was the case, I have argued, with Michael Dorris’s The Broken
Cord (1989), which recounts the celebrated novelist’s difficulty rais-
ing an adopted Lakota son with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: “He avoided
work whenever possible, refused to pay attention to his appearance,
was slow to motivate, and only occasionally told the truth” (200). In
his fervor to limit the incidence of this syndrome, Dorris—apparently a
supportive parent in everyday life—inadvertently but inevitably deval-
ued his own son’s life by presenting him as the poster child for a pre-
ventable disability.
A more positive scenario involving a subject with a cognitive impair-
ment is Rachel Simon’s Riding the Bus with My Sister (2002). After hav-
ing grown somewhat distant from her cognitively impaired sister, Rachel
reacquainted herself with Beth, immersing herself in her daily routine
of riding public transportation around her hometown. In the process,
Rachel came to see what Beth finds gratifying in what might appear to
most nondisabled people a pointless and vacant activity, literally travel-
ing in circles. Beth relished the companionship of the drivers, most of
whom welcomed her presence aboard. Rachel credits her sister with hav-
ing a life—indeed, quite a lively social life—that she created in her own
idiosyncratic way. Rachel enters that life not only as a sister, but also like
an ethnographer, watching her sister negotiate the demands of indepen-
dent living, learning what support services she uses, and reconciling her-
self to Beth’s aversion to boring jobs. The result is a kind of rare disability
(auto)ethnography. Crucially, Beth had sufficient literacy to be able to
read and endorse the story.
William Dean Howells once referred to autobiography as “the most
democratic province in the republic of letters” because it is by far the
most accessible of literary genres (Howells 795). That assessment is
far truer now than when he uttered it over a century ago. The mem-
oir boom has seen a marked increase in the number of published (and
self-published) narratives and heightened respectability for memoir as a
literary genre, which is now taught under the rubric “the fourth genre”
in creative writing programs. More important, it has also entailed a
significant change in the demographics of memoir writers. Many are
female, and many write their memoirs at relatively young ages—and
sometimes more than one. More to the point here, however, it is com-
mon today for people with disabilities—even ones that once seemed to
preclude the writing of memoir—to produce narratives published by
trade presses.
The most remarkable example of this has been the proliferation of
memoirs by autistics—rather than about them by parents or siblings.
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healthy contrast to the sordid sensuality of some of his successors,
his wife contrasts no less luminously with later Empresses, and is no
less unjustly accused of cunning. How far she developed ambition in
later years we shall consider later. In the fullness of his manhood, at
least, she was content to be the wife of Octavian. With her own
hands she helped to spin, weave, and sew his everyday garments.
She carefully reared her two boys, tended the somewhat delicate
health of Octavian, and cultivated that nice degree of affability which
kept her husband affectionate and the husbands of other noble
dames respectful. Dio would have us believe that her most useful
quality was her willingness to overlook the genial irregularities of
Octavian; but Dio betrays an excessive eagerness to detect frailties
in his heroes and heroines. We have no serious evidence that
Octavian continued the loose ways of his youth after he married
Livia. The plainest and soundest reading of the chronicle is that they
lived happily, and retained a great affection for each other, even
when fate began to rain its blows on their ill-starred house.
But before we reach those tragic days, we have to consider
briefly the years in which Octavian established his power. His first
step after his marriage with Livia was to destroy the power of the
Pompeians. Livia followed the struggle anxiously from her country
villa a few miles from Rome. Sextus Pompeius was experienced in
naval warfare, and, as repeated messages came of blunder and
defeat on the part of Octavian’s forces, she trembled with alarm. Her
confidence was restored by one of the abundant miracles of the
time. An eagle one day swooped down on a chicken which had just
picked up a sprig of laurel in the farm-yard. The eagle clumsily
dropped the chicken, with the laurel, near Livia, and so plain an
omen could not be misinterpreted. Rumour soon had it that the
eagle had laid the laurel-bearing chick gently at Livia’s feet. As in all
such cases, the sceptic of a later generation was silenced with
material proof. The chicken became the mother of a brood which for
many years spread the repute of the village through southern Italy;
the sprig of laurel became a tree, and in time furnished the
auspicious twigs of which the crowns of triumphing generals were
woven.
Whether it was by the will of Jupiter, or by the reinforcement of
a hundred and fifty ships which he received from Antony, Octavian
did eventually win, and, to the delight of Rome, cleared the route by
which the corn-ships came from Africa. Only two men now remained
between Octavian and supreme power—the two who formed with
him the Triumvirate which ruled the Republic. The first, Lepidus, was
soon convicted of maladministration in his African province, and was
transferred to the innocent duties of the pontificate, under
Octavian’s eyes, at Rome. Octavian added the province of Africa to
his half of the Roman world, and found himself in command of forty-
five legions and six hundred vessels. Fresh honours were awarded
him by the Senate, in which his devoted friend Mæcenas, who
foresaw the advantage to Rome of his rule, was working for him.
Then Octavian entered on his final conflict with Mark Antony. I
have already protested against the plausible view that Octavian was
pursuing a definite ambition under all his appearance of simplicity.
Circumstances conspired first to give him power, and then to give
him the appearance of a thirst for it. He really did not destroy
Antony, however: Antony destroyed himself. The apology that has
been made for Cleopatra in recent times only enhances Antony’s
guilt. It is said that she used all that elusive fascination of her
person, of which ancient writers find it difficult to convey an
impression, all her wealth and her wit, only to benumb the hand that
Rome stretched out to seize her beloved land. The theory is not in
the least inconsistent with the facts, and it is more pleasant to
believe that the last representative of the great free womanhood of
ancient Egypt sacrificed her person and her wealth on the altar of
patriotism than that her dalliance with Antony was but a languorous
and selfish indulgence in an hour of national peril. But if it be true
that Cleopatra was the last Egyptian patriot, Antony was all the more
clearly a traitor to Rome. The quarrel does not concern us. Octavian
induced the Senate to make war on Egypt; and we can well believe
that when, in a herald’s garb, he read the declaration of war at the
door of the temple of Bellona, the thought of his despised sister
added warmth to his phrases. The pale, patient face and outraged
virtue of Octavia daily branded Antony afresh in the eyes of Rome.
Livia and Antonia followed the swift course of the last struggle
from Rome. They heard of the meeting of the fleets off Actium, the
victorious swoop of Octavian, the flight of Antony and Cleopatra.
What followed would hardly be known to Livia. It is said that
Cleopatra offered to betray Antony to Octavian, and such an offer is
in entire harmony with the patriotic theory of her conduct. While his
able but ill-regulated rival, deserted by his forces, drew near the
edge of the abyss, Octavian visited Cleopatra in her palace. Her
seductive form was displayed on a silken couch, and from the slit-
like eyes the dangerous fire caressed the young conqueror. Cleopatra
probably relied on Octavian’s weakness, but his sensuous impulses
were held in check by a harder thought. He felt that he must have
this glorious creature to adorn his triumph at Rome. Cleopatra saw
that she had failed, and she went sadly, with a last dignity, before
the throne of Osiris. Octavian returned to Rome with the immense
treasures of Egypt, to enjoy the triumph I have already described
and to await the purple.
The domestic life of Livia and Octavian lost none of its plainness
after the attainment of supreme power. Some time after the Senate
had (27 B.C.) strengthened his position by inventing for him the title
of “Augustus”—a title by which he is generally, but improperly,
3
described in history after that date —he removed from the small
house which his father had left him to a larger mansion, built by the
orator Hortensius, on the Palatine. This was burned down in the year
6 B.C., and the citizens built a new palace for Livia and Octavian by
public subscription. At the Emperor’s command the contribution of
each was limited to one denarius. If we may trust the archæologists,
it was modest in size, but of admirable taste, especially in the
marble lining of its interior. On one side it looked down, over the
steep slope of the hill, on the colonnaded space, the Forum, in which
the life of Rome centred. On the other side it faced a group of public
buildings, raised by Octavian, which impressed the citizens with his
liberality in the public service. The splendid temple of Apollo, the
public library and other buildings, adorned with the most exquisite
works of art that his provincial expeditions had brought to Rome,
stood in fine contrast to his own plain mansion, of which the
proudest decoration was the faded wreath over the door—the
Victoria Cross of the Roman world—which bore witness that he had
saved the life of a citizen.
In this modest palace Livia reared her two children in the finer
traditions of the old Republic, while Octavian made the long journeys
into the provinces which filled many years after his attainment of
power. Livia was no narrow conservative. She took her full share in
the decent distractions of patrician life, and, like many other noble
women of the period, she built temples and other edifices of more
obvious usefulness to the public. A provincial town took the name
Liviada in her honour. We have many proofs that she was consulted
on public affairs by Octavian, and exercised a discreet and
beneficent influence on him. One of the anecdotes collected by later
writers tells that she one day met a group of naked men on the
road. It is likely that they were innocent workers or soldiers in the
heat, and not the “band of lascivious nobles” which prurient writers
have made them out to be. However, Octavian impetuously
demanded their heads when she told him, and Livia saved them with
the remark that, “in the eyes of a decent woman they were no more
offensive than a group of statues.” On another occasion she
dissuaded Octavian from executing a young noble for conspiracy. At
her suggestion the noble was brought to the Emperor’s private
room. When, instead of the merited sentence of death, Cinna
received only a kindly admonition, an offer of Octavian’s friendship,
and further promotion, he was completely disarmed and won. We
shall see further proof that the wise and humane counsels of Livia
contributed not a little to the peace and prosperity which Rome
enjoyed in its golden age.
LIVIA AS CERES
STATUE IN THE LOUVRE
For it was in truth an age of gold in comparison with the

previous hundred years and the centuries to come. The flames of
civil war had scorched the Republic time after time. The best soldiers
of Rome were dying out; the best leaders were perishing in an
ignoble contest of ambitions. Corruption spread, like a cancerous
growth, through all ranks of the citizens of Rome, and far into the
provinces. The white-robed (candidati) seekers of office in the city
now relied on the purchase of votes by expert and recognized
agents. Hundreds of thousands of the citizens lived parasitically on
the State, or on the wealthy men to whom they sold their votes, and
from whom they had free food and free entertainments. The
loathsome spectacle was seen of vast crowds of strong idle men,
boasting of their dignity as citizens of Rome, pressing to the
appointed steps for their daily doles of corn. Large numbers of them
could hardly earn an occasional coin to buy a cup of wine, a game of
dice, or a visit to the lupanaria in the Subura. By means of other
agents the wealthy refilled their coffers by extortion in the provinces,
and paraded at Rome a luxury that was often as puerile as it was
criminal. Rome, once so sober and virile, now shone on the face of
the earth like some parasitic flower, of deadly beauty, on the face of
a forest.
No man, perhaps, could have saved Rome from destruction, but
Octavian did much to clear its veins of the poison, and its chronicle
would have run very differently if he had not been succeeded by a
Caligula, a Claudius, and a Nero. He chastised injustice in the
provinces, purified the administration of justice at Rome, fought
against the growing practices of artificial sterility and artificial vice,
and genially pressed on the senators his own ideal of sober public
service. From his mansion on the Palatine he looked down without
remorse on the idle chatterers in the Forum, from whom he had
withdrawn the power, of which they still boasted, of ruling their
spreading empire. Nor were there many, amongst those who looked
up to his unpretentious palace on the edge of the cliff, who did not
feel that they had gained by the sale of their tarnished democracy.
There was more than literal truth in Octavian’s boast that he had
found Rome a city of brick, and had left it a city of marble.
Yet all the augurs and soothsayers of Rome failed to see the
swift and terrible issue that would come of this seemingly happy
change. Corrupt and repellent as democracy had become, monarchy
was presently to exhibit spectacles which would surpass all the
horrors of its civil wars, and outshame the sordid reaches of its
avarice. The new race of rulers was to descend so low as to use its
imperial power to shatter what remained of old Roman virtue, and to
embellish vice with its richest awards. From the sobriety and public
spirit of Octavian we pass quickly to the sombre melancholy of
Tiberius, the wanton brutality of Caligula, the impotent sensuality of
Claudius, the mincing folly of Nero, and the alternating gluttony and
cruelty of Domitian, before we come to the second honest effort to
avert the fate of Rome. From the genial virtue of Livia we are led to
contemplate the dissolute gaieties of Julia, the cold ambition of
Agrippina, the robust vulgarity of Cæsonia, the infectious vice of
Messalina, and the insipid frippery of Poppæa. Had there been one
syllable of truth in the divine messages which augurs and Chaldæans
saw in every movement of nature, not even the beneficent rule of
Octavian would have lured men to sacrifice even the effigy of power
that remained to them, and that they had lightly sold for a measure
of corn and the bloody orgies of the amphitheatre.
CHAPTER II
THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE
I
N tracing the further career of Livia we enter upon the opening
acts of the tragedy of the Cæsars, and we have to consider
carefully if there be any truth in the charge that Livia herself
initiated the long series of murders that now make a trail of blood
over the annals of Rome. With the coming of the Empire we more
rarely find legion pitted against legion in the horrors of civil war, but
we have nerveless ambition stooping to the despicable aid of the
poisoner, autocracy paralysing the best of the nobility with its
murderous suspicions, and folly growing more foolish with the
increasing splendour of the imperial house. We already know that
the germs of this disease were found in the quiet home of Livia and
Octavian on the Palatine. Scribonia had received her letter of divorce
a few days after the birth of her daughter Julia. As Livia bore no
direct heir to the Emperor, while Julia became the mother of many
children, we have at once the promise of a dramatic struggle for the
succession. When we further learn that the strain of Imperial blood,
which takes its rise in Julia, is thickly tainted with disease, we are
prepared for a bloody and unscrupulous conflict. And when we
reflect that on this unstable pivot the vast Empire will turn for many
generations, we begin to understand the larger tragedy of the fall of
Rome.
Let us first glance at the interior of the modest household on the

Palatine. Besides Livia and Octavian, with whom we are now familiar,
there is Octavia, sister of the Emperor and divorced wife of Mark
Antony, a gentle lady with the matronly virtues of the time when a
Roman could slay his wife or daughter for irregular conduct. With
her were her children, Marcellus and Marcella, of whom we shall
hear much. Then there were Livia’s two sons—the elder, Tiberius, a
tall, silent, moody youth, with little care to please; the younger,
Drusus, a handsome, buoyant, fair-headed boy, threatening the
elder’s birthright. Octavian closely watched the education of the
boys. He taught them to write on the wax-faced tablets in the fine
script on which he prided himself, kept them beside him at table,
and drove them in his chariot about public business.
But the most interesting and fateful figure in the group was
Julia. Octavian had removed her at an early age from the care of
Scribonia, and adopted her in the palace. She learned to spin and
weave, and helped to make the garments of the family, under the
severe eyes of Livia and Octavia. The Emperor was charmed with
the pretty and lively girl, and would make a second Livia of her.
Knowing well, if only from his own youth, the vice and folly that
abounded in those mansions on the hills of Rome, and roared in its
dimly-lighted valleys by night, he kept her apart. None of the young
fops who drove their chariots madly out by the Flaminian Gate, and
sipped their wine after supper to the prurient jokes of mimes, were
suffered to approach her. And, not for the first or last time in history,
the veiling of the young eyes had an effect quite contrary to that
intended. A Roman girl became a woman at fourteen, a mother at
fifteen. At that early age, in the year 25 B.C., Julia was married to her
cousin Marcellus, who was then seventeen. Marcellus was so clearly
a possible successor to the throne that courtiers hung about him,
and taught him the art of princely living. The doors of the hidden
world were opened, and the tender eyes of Julia were dazed.
The authorities are careless in chronology, and we may decline
to believe that Julia at once entered on the riotous ways which led
her to the abyss. Her marriage concerns us in a very different
respect. All the writers who adopt the view that Livia was a hard and
unscrupulous woman—a view that Tacitus must have taken from the
memoirs of her rival’s granddaughter, the Empress Agrippina, which
were made public in his time—consider that this marriage of Julia
and Marcellus marks the beginning of her career of crime. She is
supposed to have been alarmed at the marriage of two direct
descendants of Cæsar, seeing that she herself had no child by
Octavian. Most certainly she was ambitious for her elder son. The
boy whom she had clasped to her breast, when she fled along the
roads of Campania and through the burning forests of Greece, was
now a clever and studious youth, and she wished Octavian to adopt
him. Unfortunately, Tiberius was of a moody and solitary nature, and
was easily displaced in Octavian’s affection by the handsome and
popular Marcellus and the beautiful and witty Julia.
The first cloud appeared in the year 23 B.C. Octavian fell seriously
ill, and Livia’s hope of securing the succession for her son was
troubled by two formidable competitors. One was Marcellus, the
other was Octavian’s friend and ablest general, M. V. Agrippa. He
was of poor origin, but of commanding ability and character, and
was suspected of entertaining a design to restore the Republic. He
was married to Marcella, and had some contempt for the spoiled
boy, her brother Marcellus—a contempt which Marcellus repaid with
petulance and rancour. Octavian recovered, sent Agrippa on an
important errand to the East, and made Marcellus Ædile of the city.
Marcellus was winning, the eager observers thought, when suddenly
he fell seriously ill and died. The death was so opportune for Tiberius
that we cannot wonder that a faint whisper of poison went through
Rome when his ashes were laid in the lofty marble tower that
Octavian had built in the meadows by the Tiber. But we need not
linger over this first charge against Livia. Even Dio, who is no sceptic
in regard to rumours which defame Empresses, hesitates to press on
us so airy and improbable a myth. It was a hot and pestilential
summer, and Marcellus seems to have contracted fever by remaining
too long at his post, before going to Baiæ on the coast.
The death of Marcellus, far from promoting the cause of
Tiberius, brought a more formidable obstacle in his way. Octavian
sent for Agrippa, and directed him to divorce Marcella and wed Julia.
The general, who was in his forty-second year, thought it immaterial
which of the two young princesses shared his bed, and Octavia
consented to the divorce of her daughter—as some conjecture, to
thwart Livia’s design. To the delight of Octavian the union of robust
manhood and amorous young womanhood was fruitful. During the
ten years of their marriage Julia gave birth to three sons and two
daughters. Happily unconscious of the tragedies which were to close
the careers of these children in his own lifetime, Octavian welcomed
them with great enthusiasm. During his whole reign he was engaged
in a futile effort to induce or compel the better families of Rome to
take a larger share in the peopling of the Empire. When he penalized
celibacy, they defeated him by contracting marriages with the
intention of seeking an immediate divorce. When he made adultery a
public crime, there were noblewomen—few in number, it is true; the
facts are often exaggerated—who enrolled themselves on the list of
shame, and noblemen who took on the degrading rank of gladiators,
in order to escape the penalties. He created a guild of honour for the
mothers of at least three children; but the distinction seemed to the
ladies of Rome to be an inadequate reward for so onerous an
accomplishment, and they scoffed when Livia was enrolled in the
guild, though the only child she had conceived of Octavian had
never seen the light.
Far greater, however, was the amusement of Rome when
Octavian held up Julia as a model of maternity, and ostentatiously
fondled her babies in public. A coarse and witty reply that she is said
to have made, when some one asked her how it was that all her
children so closely resembled her husband, was then circulated in
4
Roman society, and is preserved in Macrobius. Beautiful, lively, and
cultivated, the young girl had exchanged with delight the dull
homeliness of her father’s mansion for the rose-crowned banquets of
her new world. Her marriage with Agrippa restrained her gaiety for a
time, but her husband was often summoned to distant provinces,
and she was left to her dissolute friends. Octavian was curiously
blind to her conduct, but when Agrippa was compelled to undertake
a lengthy mission in the East, he ordered Julia to accompany him.
The journey would not improbably foster her vicious tendencies.
There is truth in the old adage that all light came to Europe from the
East, but it is hardly less true that darkness came to Rome from the
East. Julia would not be ignorant how the ancient Roman puritanism
had been corrupted by the introduction of Eastern habits and types
—the poisoner, the Chaldæan astrologer, the Syrian dancer, the
eunuch, the cultivated Greek slave, the priests of orgiastic Eastern
cults. A mind like hers would seek to penetrate the depths from
which these types had emerged. In Greece she would find the
remains of its perfumed vices lingering at the foot of its decaying
monuments. In Antioch there would not be wanting freedwomen to
gratify her curiosity in regard to its unnatural excesses and the
world-famed license of its groves. In Judæa she was long and
splendidly entertained at the court of Herod, a monarch with ten
wives and concubines innumerable.
They returned to Rome in the year 13, and in the following year
Agrippa died of gout, and Julia was free. One of the most surprising
features of her wild career—one that would make us hesitate to
admit the charges against her, if hesitation were possible—is that
Livia was either ignorant of her more serious misdeeds, or unable to
convince Octavian of them. Livia would hardly spare her, as Julia was
inflaming Octavian’s dislike for Tiberius. Refined, sensitive, and
studious, the young man avoided the boisterous amusements in
which other young patricians spent their ample leisure, and his cold
melancholy made him distasteful to them. One of the Roman writers
would have us believe that Julia made love to him during the life of
Agrippa, and that she incited Octavian against him in revenge for his
rejection of her advances. The story is improbable. We need only
suppose that Julia, in speaking of Tiberius, used the disdainful
language which was common to her friends. Neither Livia nor
Tiberius seems to have attempted to open the Emperor’s eyes to
Julia’s conduct. Octavian disliked her luxurious ways, but was blind
to her vices, though the names of her lovers were on the lips of all.
One day Octavian scolded her for having a crowd of fast young
nobles about her, and commended to her the staid example of Livia.
She disarmed him with the laughing reply that, when she was old,
her companions would be as old as those of the Empress. One writer
says that Octavian compelled her to give up a too sumptuous palace
which she occupied. One is more disposed to believe the story that,
when he remonstrated with her for her luxurious ways, she replied
“My father may forget that he is Cæsar, but I cannot forget that I am
Cæsar’s daughter.”
In spite of their mutual aversion Octavian now ordered Tiberius
to marry her. He was already married to Vipsania, the virtuous and
affectionate daughter of Agrippa, and this enforced separation from
one whom he loved with an ardour that was fading from Roman
marriage, and union with one who contrasted with Vipsania as the
wild flaming poppy contrasts with the lily, further soured and
embittered him. We may dismiss in a very few words his relations
with the woman who ought to have been the second Empress of
Rome. After a few years spent, as a rule, in distant frontier wars, he
returned to Rome in the year 6 B.C., to find that his wife had passed
the last bounds of decency and Octavian was as blind as ever. In
intense disgust, and in spite of his mother’s entreaties, he begged
the Emperor’s permission to spend some years in literary and
scientific studies at Rhodes. Not daring to open the eyes of Octavian
to the true character of his daughter, he had to bow to his anger and
disdain, and seek consolation in the calm mysteries of the planets
and the fine sentiments of Greek tragedians.
JULIA
BUST IN THE MUSEUM CHIARAMONTI
Julia now cast aside the last traces of restraint. A half-dozen of

the young nobles of Rome are associated with her in the chronicles,
and, gossipy and unreliable as the records are, in this case the issue
of the story disposes us to believe the charges. Round such a repute
as hers legends were bound to grow, and the conscientious
biographer must be reserved in giving details. Dio tells us, for
instance, that she expected her lovers to put crowns, for each
success she permitted them to attain, at the foot of the statue of
Marsyas—a public statue, at the feet of which Roman lawyers were
wont to place a crown when they had won a case. However that
may be, it is certain that in the nightly dissipation of Rome, when
plebeian offenders sought the darkness of the Milvian Bridge, or
wantoned in the taverns and brothels of the Subura, Julia’s party
was one of the boldest and most conspicuous. Not content with the
riotous supper, which it was now the fashion to prolong by lamp-
light, in perfumed chambers, until late hours of the night, Julia and
her friends went out into the streets, and caroused in the very
tribunal in the Forum—the Rostra, a platform decorated with the
prows of captured vessels—from which her father made known his
5
Imperial decisions.
The thunder of the Imperial anger scattered this licentious band
some time in the second year before Christ. In the earlier part of the
year Octavian had entertained Rome with one of the thrilling
spectacles which he often provided. To celebrate the dedication of a
new temple of Mars, which he had built, he had the Flaminian Circus
flooded, gave the people a mock naval battle, and had thirteen
crocodiles slain by the gladiators. Julia had hoodwinked the Emperor
so long that she and her friends seem to have abandoned all
restraint, and their adventures came to the knowledge of the
Emperor.
The charges against Julia must have been beyond cavil, since
Octavian, who loved her deeply, at once yielded her to the course of
justice. A charge of conspiracy was made out against her
companions. One of the young nobles killed himself, and the rest
were banished. Julia was convicted of adultery—the evil that her
father had fought for ten years—and from the glitter of Rome she
was roughly conducted to the barren rock-island of Pandateria
(Ponza), in the Gulf of Gæta. In that narrow and depressing jail,
with no female attendants, no wine and no finery, accompanied only
by her unhappy mother, the fascinating young princess spent five
years, looking with anguish over the blue water toward the faint
outline of the hills of Italy, or southward toward those rose-strewn
waters of Baiæ, where she had dreamed away so many brilliant
summers. Rome, touched with pity for the stricken woman, implored
Octavian to forgive her; and when he swore that fire and water
should meet before he pardoned her, the people naively flung
burning torches into the Tiber. Hearing, after a few years, that there
was a plot to release her, Octavian had her removed to a more
secure prison in Calabria. There she dragged out her miserable life
until her father died, and Tiberius came to the throne. When he in
turn refused to release her, she sank slowly into the peace of death.
There is no charge against Livia in connexion with this tragic fate
of Julia, but another possible rival of Tiberius had disappeared
during these years, and there is the usual vague accusation that the
Empress assisted the action of nature. Drusus, her younger son,
died in the year 9 B.C., and Livia is charged with sacrificing him to her
affection for her elder son. The charge is preposterous. Drusus had,
it is true, been much more popular than Tiberius at Rome. His genial
and engaging manner gave him a great advantage over the retiring
and almost sullen Tiberius. But the brothers loved each other deeply,
and when Tiberius, who was making a tour in the north of Gaul,
heard that Drusus was dangerously ill in Germany, he at once rode
four hundred miles on horseback, and held Drusus in his arms in his
last hour. Livia was at Ticinum, in the north of Italy, with Octavian
when the news reached them. That either Livia or Tiberius—for both
are accused—should have in any way promoted the death of Drusus
is a frivolous suggestion. The epitomist of Livy, Tacitus, and
Suetonius, describe the death as natural. Drusus was thrown and
injured by a frantic horse. The libel that his death was in some
mysterious way accelerated may have been set afoot by his
partisans. It was generally believed that he favoured a restoration of
the Republic, and the corrupt officials who, at his death, lost their
faint hope of returning to the days of peculation and bribery, may
have begun the charge. No evidence is offered for it. Livia and
Octavian accompanied the remains to Rome with great sorrow.
Seneca says that the Empress was so distressed that she summoned
one of the Stoic philosophers to console her.
The next charge against Livia requires a more careful
examination. By the beginning of the present era, when the poor
health of Octavian gave occasion for many speculations as to the
succession, there were only two rivals to the chances of Tiberius.
These were the elder sons of Julia, and Livia must have reflected
gloomily on their fortune. While Tiberius remained in retirement at
Rhodes the young princes were idolized by Octavian and by the
people. Tiberius had proposed to return to Rome after the
banishment of Julia, but Octavian peevishly told him to remain in
Greece. Every astrologer in Rome must have read in the planets that
either Caius or Lucius was born to the purple. They were spoiled by
Octavian, enriched with premature honours, and, glittering in silver
trappings, appeared in the spectacles as “Princes of the youth of
Rome.” Let those youths be removed from the scene by any
accident, and so prurient a city as Rome will be bound to discover
some insidious action on the part of Livia; and later writers, brooding
over a chronicle in which ambition leads freely to the most brutal
murders, will be disposed to believe her guilty.
It is somewhat surprising to find more recent writers caught by
the fallacy. We are not puzzled when the scandal-loving Serviez
opens his chapter on Livia with a glowing enumeration of her
virtues, adopts nearly every libel against her as he proceeds, and
closes with a very dark estimate of her character; but we are entitled
to expect more discrimination in Merivale. Even Mr. Tarver, in his
recent “Tiberius the Tyrant” (1902), does much injustice to the
mother in vindicating the son. He speaks of her as “hard, avaricious,
and a lover of power,” and, without the least evidence—indeed,
against all probability—suggests that it was Livia who urged Octavian
to keep Tiberius in retirement at Rhodes. He makes Livia hostile to
Tiberius in favour of Julia’s sons, on the ground that she would find
them more pliant than Tiberius. Every other writer suggests precisely
the contrary. They make her murder Julia’s sons in the interest of
Tiberius.
The death of the younger son, Lucius, is obscure. He was sent
on a mission to Spain in the year 2 A.D., and died at Marseilles on the
way. Since the only ground for the rumour that he was poisoned is
the indubitable fact that he died, we need not delay in considering it.
Octavian then sent the elder brother Caius on a mission into Syria
under the care of his old tutor Lollius. His counsellor unhappily died
in the East, and the young prince was left to the vicious companions
who regarded him as the future dispenser of Imperial favours. He
fell into Oriental ways, and was at length (A.D. 3) treacherously
wounded by a Syrian patriot. Instead of returning to Rome, he
remained in the unhealthy atmosphere of the East, indulged in its
habits of languor and vice, and died eighteen months after the death
of his brother. There is no obscurity about his death. It is beyond
question that he was severely wounded by a Syrian. But the deaths
of the two brothers happened so opportunely for Tiberius that one
cannot wonder at the suspicion, in certain minds, that Livia had had
the youths poisoned. Nothing more than this vague rumour is given
us by Tacitus, Dio, Suetonius, or Pliny; and it is from a sheer
pruriency of romance that later writers, like Serviez, have accepted
and emphasized the suspicion recorded in the Roman historians. Not
on such slender grounds can we be asked to sacrifice the conception
of Livia’s character which is forced on us by the plainer facts of her
career. The youths were delicate; Caius, at least, had undermined
his frail constitution by luxury, if not by vice; and the Roman world
harboured death in a hundred forms.
If we still hesitate to choose between the artifice of Livia and the
unaided action of natural causes in this removal of the obstacles to
the advancement of Tiberius, we have only to glance at the fate of
the rest of Julia’s children. The third son, Agrippa, was as robust in
body as his brothers were weak, but he was defective in mind and
devoid of moral control. His boorish conduct as a boy gave great
pain to Livia and Octavia, and his great physical strength broke out
in uncontrollable gusts of passion. In his adolescence he readily
adopted the worst vices that Rome could teach him, and Octavian
was obliged to condemn him to imprisonment and exile. There
remained the two daughters, Julia and Agrippina. The younger, the
sanest of Julia’s children, lived to intrigue for power, and greatly to
embarrass Livia’s later years; though we shall find the same tragic
fate befalling her after the death of the Empress, who protected her.
The elder, Julia, was banished (A.D. 9) for incest, and, like her
mother, lacking the courage or virtue to end her shame as the nobler
Romans did, she protracted her miserable life for twenty years, her
hard lot only alleviated by the charity of Livia.
Fate had removed every possible competitor to the succession of
Tiberius. He returned to Rome, and his judicious and sedulous
activity removed the last traces of the Emperor’s resentment. Peace
returned, after many years of storm, to the mansion on the Palatine.
But Octavian had suffered profoundly from those terrible and
persistent storms. The Rome of his manhood was gone. All his
friends and counsellors had disappeared, and the future of his
people filled him with apprehension. The patrician stock was
decaying from luxury and vice; the ordinary citizens clamoured for
free food and free entertainment with a blind disregard of the laws
of national health. He shrank from the public gaze, and leaned
affectionately on Livia and Tiberius.
In the year 14 he remained at Rome in the early heat of the
summer, and became seriously ill. Livia and Tiberius went down with
him to the coast, where he rallied, and some pleasant days were
spent on the island of Capreæ (Capri), which he had bought. They
passed to the mainland, where Tiberius left them, but he was soon
recalled by a message from his mother that the Emperor was
sinking. On the last morning of his life Octavian dressed with
unaccustomed care, and summoned his friends to his bedside. Was
Rome tranquil on receiving the news of his dangerous condition? Did
they approve of his conduct and accomplishments? They gave him
the assurance he desired, and were dismissed. Could they have
foreseen the line of rulers who were to stain the purple robe with
blood, and load it with shame, for so many decades to come, they
would have wept. The last moments were for Livia. He died kissing
her, and murmuring: “Be mindful of our marriage, Livia. Farewell.” So
ended, peacefully, a union that had lasted fifty-two years in a city
where divorce was as lightly esteemed as marriage. There can be
little serious doubt about the character of the first Empress of Rome.
Livia probably concealed the death of Octavian until Tiberius
arrived from Dalmatia. A report was given out that Tiberius arrived
in time to receive the last injunctions of the Emperor. This may be
doubted without any serious reflection on her character; if, indeed, it
was she, and not Tiberius, who spread the report. There were grave
fears—well-founded fears, as we shall see—that a plot, in the
interest of corruption, had been framed to prevent the succession of
Tiberius. In the coolness of the night, so as to avoid the intense heat
of August, they bore the remains with great pomp to the capital.
There, on a bed of ivory and purple, preceded by wax effigies of
Octavian and of earlier rulers of Rome, the body was carried to the
temple of Julius, where Tiberius read a funeral oration. The cortège
went on to the Field of Mars, by the Tiber, through lines of black-
draped citizens. The pile was fired, and zealous eyes saw the soul of
Octavian mount toward heaven in the outward form of an eagle.
Livia, on approved custom, remained by the sacred ashes for
five days, and then returned to face the new life which opened for
her. With the especially wild suggestion that she had accelerated the
death of her husband we may disdain to concern ourselves. It was
owing to her devoted care that the ailing and delicate Octavian had
lived to old age. But a second libel in connexion with the death of
Octavian must be briefly considered.
The apprehension, or the secret information, of the dying
Emperor was correct. No sooner was his death announced than a
servant of the imprisoned son of Julia hurried to the coast, and set
sail for the island of Planasia, with the intention of bringing Agrippa
to Rome as a candidate for the purple. He arrived only to find a
bleeding corpse. The centurion in charge had dispatched Agrippa as
soon as the Emperor’s death was made known to him.
Who gave the order for this execution? One cannot call it
murder, for Agrippa was unfit to be restored to society, and any
attempt to raise him to the throne would have been disastrous to
Rome. The authorities, as usual, merely give us the rumours that
circulated at the time, and leave us to choose between Octavian,
Livia, and Tiberius. We can have little difficulty in choosing. It would
be so natural for either Octavian or Tiberius to crush the conspiracy
by executing Agrippa that the introduction of Livia is superfluous.
Most probably Octavian had left directions with Agrippa’s custodian.
There is a curious story, in several contradictory versions, but
credible in substance, that Octavian in his later years paid a secret
visit to Planasia, to see personally what Agrippa’s real condition was.
Quite the most plausible theory is that, after personal verification of
his madness, Octavian felt it best for Rome, and not inhuman to
Agrippa, to have him put to death as soon as the question of
succession was opened.
We come to the last phase of Livia’s career. Tiberius was now a
tall, handsome man, though slightly disfigured, with long fair hair
and features strangely delicate for one of his exceptional physical
strength. A better soldier than his predecessor, and not an inept
statesman, he was well enough fitted to wield the power which
Octavian had virtually bequeathed to him. But a retiring disposition,
an unhappy youth, and long years of study, had made him shrink
from the society of any but scholars, and he long hesitated to
ascend the throne to which the Senate invited him. We have not
good ground to regard this reluctance as feigned. At last he
consented, and the critics of Livia would have it that her ambition
now passed such bounds as had been set to it by the ability of
Octavian. We may freely admit that she looked forward to being
closely associated in power with the son whose career she had
followed with such devotion and helpfulness. On the other hand, we
shall see how advantageous to the State her influence was; the evils
that at once begin to darken the life of Rome when Tiberius rejects
her counsels will plainly show this. Nor is there any evidence that
she sought power from any other motive than the good of the State.
She might take pride in what she did, and even exaggerate it, but
such a pride is not inconsistent with the view that she was ever
gentle, humane, and generous.
The first searching test of her character occurs a few years after
the accession of Tiberius. As the news of the death of Octavian
slowly travelled over the Empire, there were mutinous movements
among the legions in many provinces. In Lower Germany, especially,
the troops considered that their commander, Germanicus, the
nephew of Tiberius, was entitled to the purple, and they asked him
to lead them to Rome. He was a handsome, engaging young
general, of imperial blood, with moderate ability and much conceit,
and had won the regard of the soldiers by visiting the sick and
wounded, advancing their pay out of his own purse, and other
popular acts. He was married to Julia’s daughter, Agrippina, who
lived in camp with him. They dressed their little son Caius in soldier’s
costume, and his quaint appearance in miniature military boots won
for him the pet-name Caligula (“Little-boots”) by which he is known
to history. The legionaries thought that they had with them a model
Imperial family, and promised to wrest the throne from Tiberius.
Germanicus weakly composed the mutiny—mainly by forging a letter
in the name of Tiberius and then treacherously executing the leaders
—and endeavoured to cover his blunders by vigorous and rather
aimless attacks upon the Germans. Tiberius recalled him to Rome to
enjoy a “triumph,” and to keep him out of further mischief.
Merivale acknowledges that his conquests were “wholly
visionary,” but Germanicus had inherited the charm and popularity of
his father, Drusus, and Rome was easily won for him. People
streamed out from the gates to meet him, and gazed with awe on
his gigantic blue-eyed captives and on the large highly-coloured
paintings of his victories in Germany. It was a new source of concern
for Livia and Tiberius, and, to the satisfaction of Livia’s critics, the
danger ended like all the others.
Germanicus and Agrippina were sent on a mission to the East.
Tiberius seems to have had some disdain for his spoiled and
conceited nephew, and he was well aware of the interested aims of
those who affected to see in him a restorer of the old republican
liberty. He chose an older statesman, Cn. Calpurnius Piso, to go out
as Governor of Syria, to watch and prudently direct the movements
of Germanicus. With Piso was his wife Plancina, an intimate friend of
Livia. From these Tiberius and Livia shortly heard exasperating
accounts of the progress of Germanicus and Agrippina. Piso found,
on calling at Athens, that Germanicus had been flattering the Greeks
for their ancient culture, instead of pressing the dominion of Rome.
He made free comments on the young general’s conduct, pushed
past his galleys, as they dallied in Greek waters, and was hard at
work in Syria when Germanicus arrived. The wives conducted the
quarrel with more asperity than their husbands.
Rome had now its party of Germanicus and party of Tiberius,
and the news from the East was heatedly discussed. Germanicus has
gone to Egypt, without asking the Emperor’s permission, and is
patronizing the Greek and Egyptian cults, which Tiberius represses,
and going about in Greek instead of Roman dress. Piso has had a
violent quarrel with Germanicus, and left Syria. And before they have
time to discuss this important intelligence there comes a report that
Germanicus is dangerously ill; that bones of dead men, half-burnt
fragments of sacrificial victims, leaden tablets with the name of
Germanicus scrawled on them, and other deadly charms, have been
found under the floors and between the walls of his house. At length
the news comes that Germanicus is dead, and that with his last
breath he has urged his friends to avenge him. Rome goes into
mourning. All the shops are closed, and crowds gather everywhere
to discuss this fresh tragedy of the Imperial house. In the middle of
the night a rumour spreads that Germanicus is not dead, and people
fill the streets with the glare of their torches, and break into the
temples. But the fatal news is confirmed, and, when at last Agrippina
comes with the golden urn containing his ashes, such mourning is
seen as no living man can remember.
People observed that neither Livia nor Tiberius appeared at the
funeral. Livia had no reason to be present, and Tiberius knew that
the demonstration was due largely to a spirit of hostility to himself.
For the rest, it was merely the feeling of a frivolous people for a
handsome and unfortunate youth. But Livia incurred more serious
censure during the trial of Piso which followed. The ex-governor of
Syria defended himself resolutely for a day or two, and then, hearing
that his wife had deserted him, committed suicide. The anger of the
citizens now turned on the wife, Plancina. The Empress, with whom
she had been in close communication throughout, begged Tiberius
to save her, and he reluctantly checked the prosecution. Livia was, of
course, accused of sheltering a murderess. It must be recollected
that the accounts of the story are taken in part from the memoirs of
Agrippina’s daughter, and are coloured with prejudice against
Tiberius and his mother. One cannot see anything more serious than
indiscretion in Livia’s conduct. Her conviction of the innocence of
Plancina is intelligible enough, and one can equally understand how
she would distrust a trial held at Rome in the inflamed state of public
feeling. There is no serious reason to suspect, in the death of
Germanicus, the action of any other poison than the tainted
atmosphere of the East.
But the interference of Livia annoyed Tiberius, and the ten years
that follow are full of differences between mother and son. The
Emperor’s resentment of his mother’s share in public affairs had
begun with his reign. Livia had proposed to erect a statue to the
memory of Octavian. Tiberius interfered, and referred her to the
Senate for permission. She then proposed to give a commemoratory
banquet to the Senators and their wives. Tiberius restricted her to
the wives, and entertained the Senators himself. He reduced her
escort, frowned on the public honours that were paid to her, and
resented her interference in public affairs. On one occasion her
friend Urgulania was summoned for debt, and, presuming on her
intimacy with the Empress, treated the process with contempt. Livia
asked Tiberius to quash the proceedings, and he deliberately
lingered so much on his way to the Forum that the case was allowed
to proceed.
These are a few of the stories which illustrate the want of
harmony between them. For this Livia was largely to blame. It was
not unnatural that she, who had been so often and so profitably
consulted by Octavian, should expect a larger power under the
young Emperor, but she failed to take discreet account of the
extreme sensitiveness of Tiberius. If a story given in Suetonius is
correct, she so far lost her discretion in one of their quarrels as to
produce old letters in which Octavian had made bitter reflections on
the defects of Tiberius. The fault was not wholly on her side,
however. Tiberius was jealous when he contrasted the honour and
respect paid to her with the general feeling of reserve and distrust
toward himself, and he pleaded the old-fashioned idea of woman’s
sphere as a pretext to restrain her. He grumbled when he one day
found her directing the extinction of a fire, as she had done more
than once in Octavian’s time, and he was seriously angry when he
found that she had placed her name before his on a public
inscription.
But we may leave these lesser matters and come to the next
tragedy in the Imperial chronicle, the shadow of which darkened
Livia’s closing years. She had retired from the palace to the house
which she had inherited from her first husband, Tiberius Nero. Here
she remained a saddened and helpless spectator of the coming
disaster. Tiberius, whom she saw only once more before she died,
had become a peevish and gloomy old man. His tall spare frame was
bent, his head bald, his face, which had always been disfigured with
pimples, now hideous with eczema, or concealed with bandages. His
large melancholy eyes so startled people that they believed he could
see in the dark. Astrologers and students of the occult gathered
about him in the palace he had built on the Palatine, and the way lay
open for adventurers.
The two chief aspirants for power were Agrippina, the widow of
Germanicus, and Sejanus, Tiberius’s favourite general. Julia’s
younger daughter seems to have concentrated in her person all the
masculinity of her family. “Implacable,” as Tacitus says, proud, and
ambitious, she added to the gloom that was deepening on the
Palatine. Merivale calls her the “she-wolf.” It seems probable that
she sought marriage with the aged Tiberius in order to secure power
for herself or her son. The only son of the Emperor had been
poisoned by Sejanus, as we shall see presently, and her son had a
plausible title to inherit the purple. The authorities tell us that
Tiberius one day found her in tears, and was entreated, when he
asked the reason, to find her a husband. She thought it expedient to
forget the supposed share of Tiberius in the death of her husband.
Her innocent manœuvres were met, however, by the sinister
intrigues of Sejanus, one of the most unscrupulous characters we
have yet encountered. Under a cloak of friendliness he was
countering her schemes and ruining her house. He had seduced her
daughter Livilla, the wife of Tiberius’s son Drusus, and had, with her
connivance, poisoned the young prince, and kept the secret from the
Emperor for many years. It is said that he then made proposals to
Agrippina to unite their ambitions, and, when these were rejected,
he determined to destroy her and secure the supreme power for
himself. He put his great ability astutely at the service of the
Emperor, and once had the good fortune to save his life, by arching
his herculean body over Tiberius when the roof of a cave fell on
them. It is probable that he inflamed the resentment of Tiberius
against his mother, and then used the estrangement to increase the
unpopularity of the Emperor. Scurrilous libels on “the ungrateful son”
were current in Rome. These are sometimes attributed to writers in
the service of Livia, but it would be a natural part of the scheme of
Sejanus to spread them. On one occasion a noble lady, Appuleia
Varilia, was charged by the Senate with accusing Tiberius and Livia
of incest. Tiberius consulted his mother, and declared to the Senate
that they wished to treat the libel with contemptuous indifference.
To Sejanus also we must, on the authority of Tacitus, attribute a
plot against Agrippina, which other writers assign to Tiberius or to
Livia. At a banquet in the palace it was noticed that Agrippina, pale
and sullen, passed all the dishes untouched. Tiberius at length
invited her to eat a fine apple which he chose. Under the eyes of all
she handed it to a servant to throw away, and Tiberius not
unnaturally complained of her unjust suspicions. Tacitus, who gives
the most credible version of the story, says that the agents of
Sejanus had warned her that she was to be poisoned at the
banquet, so that she would act in a way that the Emperor would
resent.
Tiberius, weary of the violent passions of the capital, now lived
chiefly in Campania. It is not improbable that his disfigurement
made him sensitive. Rome would not spare the feelings of so
unpopular a ruler. It is not at all clear that he shrank from his
Imperial duties—Suetonius expressly says that he thought it possible
to rule better from the provinces—or that he wished to indulge in
the wild debauches which some attribute to him. Probably Sejanus,
to secure more power for himself, persuaded him that he could best
discharge his duties from a provincial seat.
At this juncture, in the year 29, saddened by the estrangement
from her son, by his helpless surrender to an unscrupulous
adventurer, and by the increasing degeneration of Rome, Livia died.
She had, by sober living—Pliny adds, by the constant chewing of a
sweetmeat containing a certain medicinal root, and by the use of
Pucinian wine—attained the great age of eighty-six. She had seen
her husband dispel the long horrors of civil war, refresh the Empire,
and adorn Rome; and she had felt the gloom and chill of a coming
tragedy in her later years. Few of the Empresses have been so
differently estimated as Livia. Merivale regards her as “a memorable
example of successful artifice, having obtained in succession, by
craft if not by crime, every object she could desire in the career of
female ambition.” He adds: “But she had long survived every
genuine attachment she may at any time have inspired, nor has a
single voice been raised by posterity to supply the want of honest
6
eulogium in her own day.”
The more concentrated research of the biographer has often to
reverse the verdict of the historian, and in this case it must acquit
Livia of either craft or vice. It is a singular error to say that Livia had
no “honest eulogium” in her own day. The Roman Senate is exposed
to the disdain of historians for its obsequiousness to the reigning
Emperor, yet, at the death of Livia, it sought to honour her memory
in spite of the resentment of Tiberius. The Emperor had refused to
go to Rome, either to see her before death or to attend her funeral.
He gave to Rome an example of silent indifference. Yet he had to
use his authority to prevent the Senate from decreeing divine
honours to Livia, building an arch to her memory, and declaring her
“mother of her country.” Dio remarks that the Senators were moved
to do these things out of sincere gratitude and respect. Few of the
less wealthy members of the Senate had not profited by her
generosity. Their children had been educated, and their daughters
had received dowries, from her purse. Her generosity is recognized
by all the authorities. Her humanity is made plain by the contents of
this chapter.
The adverse estimate of Livia’s character is chiefly based on the
“Annals” of Tacitus, and it has long been recognized that Tacitus
drew his account largely from the memoirs of the younger Agrippina,
daughter of the woman who hated Livia. Yet Tacitus adds, when he
has recorded the death of Livia: “From this moment the government
of Tiberius became a sheer oppressive despotism. While Augusta
lived one avenue of escape remained open, for the Emperor was
habitually deferent toward his mother, and Sejanus dared not thwart
her parental authority; but when this curb was removed, there was
7
nothing to check their further career.”
We have seen that Livia had used the same restraining influence
on the impetuosity of Octavian. With her died the attribute, or the
wise policy, of Imperial clemency, only to be revived by Emperors
who adopted that Stoic creed in which she found consolation after
the death of her son. That she was “hard” and “unscrupulous” is
entirely at variance with the most authenticated facts of her career.
To say that she was “avaricious” is a sheer absurdity. She maintained
her sober personal habits to the end, and took money only to
bestow it on the indigent and worthy, or expend it in raising public
buildings. We may grant that she had some ambition, but may claim
that it was well for Rome that she had it. She fell into many errors of
judgment in her later years, when Roman life was confused by such
strong undercurrents of intrigue; but these very errors tend to
discredit the notion that she employed a consummate art and strong
intelligence in the furthering of her own interests. In a word, it is the
vices and follies of later Empresses that have disposed historians to
regard her sober virtues as a mere mask.
NOTE
For the guidance of the general reader it is advisable to
add a few words on the Latin authorities, whom we now
constantly quote. Tacitus, the chief source of our knowledge
down to the year 70 A.D., is not only weakened as an historian
by the very strength of his morality, but he has too lightly
followed the memoirs in which the later Agrippina defamed
the rival Imperial family. Suetonius, who takes us as far as
Domitian, is no less honest, but he has too genial and
indulgent a love of anecdotes to discard any on the mere
ground that they are untrue or improbable. Dio Cassius, who
covers the first two centuries, is usually described as
malignant; but one may question if he does more than
indulge still further the same amiable preference of piquancy
to truth. The “Historia Augusta,” which is our chief authority
for the greater part of the Empresses and the richest source
of scandal, has been much and profitably discussed since
Gibbon placed such reliance on it. It is now thought by some
experts that the original writers of this series of biographical
sketches of the Roman Emperors lived at the beginning of the
third century, and had a comparatively sober standard of
work. Toward the close of the third, or beginning of the
fourth, century the work was written afresh by the group of
less scrupulous writers whose names, or pseudonyms,
actually stand at the head of its chapters. But a still later
writer once more recast the work, and lowered its authority.
He wrote frankly from the point of view of the piquant
anecdotist, omitting much that would interest only the prosy
student of exact facts, and filling up the vacant space with
such faint legends of Imperial vice or folly as still, in his time,
lingered without the pale of history, or arose in the field of
romance. The question is fully discussed by Otto Schultz,
“Leben des Kaisers Hadrian” (1905), and Professor
Kornemann, “Kaiser Hadrian” (1906).

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* This essay served as a foreword to a special issue of Revue Electronique d’études

Many classic American autobiographies betray the pressure of a pro-

Rather than reexamining those texts further here, I wish to reflect on

In 2011, approaching my last sabbatical before the big sabbatical (my

* I gave this talk as a Distinguished Faculty Lecture at Hofstra in 2011. In the

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According to the dictionary, then, memoir is either two distinct things, or

autobiography, biography, and memoir, including graphic mem-

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This audacious claim, potentially offensive in its seeming dismissal of

The largest by far is the childhood memoir—incestuous, abusive,

Let me begin at the beginning, with my title. “Quality-of-life writing”

* I gave this lecture to a group of faculty and graduate students in Medical

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By placing a tick in one box in each group below, please indicate

For it was in truth an age of gold in comparison with the

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