Journal Facts

Journal
Auto/Biography
ISSN
0967-5507
Volume
12
Issue
1

Article Facts

Title
The Obituary of a Face: Lucy Grealy, Death Writing and Posthumous Harm
DOI
10.1191/0967550704ab001oa
Author
G. Thomas Couser (Hofstra University, USA, enggtc at hofstra.edu)
Pages
1-15

Article Links

The Obituary of a Face: Lucy Grealy, Death Writing and Posthumous Harm

G. Thomas Couser (Hofstra University, USA, enggtc at hofstra.edu)

DOI: 10.1191/0967550704ab001oa

Abstract

On 12 December 2002, the New York Times published an obituary of Lucy Grealy: `Lucy Grealy, 39, who wrote a memoir on her disfigurement'. Without saying so directly, the obituary implied that Grealy committed suicide because of continued, or increasing, unhappiness about her disfigurement. It is hard to imagine an obituary more at odds with the book that made her famous (and thus earned her a New York Times obituary), The autobiography of a face. In her memoir Grealy chronicles a lifelong struggle to accept her face. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's obituary reconstructs her life in terms of the tritest script of disability - that of triumph over adversity - and then characterizes its ending as a tragic reversal of that presumed triumph.Although it is rarely discussed as a significant form of life writing, the obituary is probably the genre most familiar to and most commonly consumed by the public. As such it is worthy of attention, and its implications are perhaps most interesting when it both depends on, and departs from, the self-written life of its subject, as this one does. Joel Feinberg's theory of posthumous harm holds that, although it may be impossible (in some sense) to harm the dead since the dead are no longer persons/subjects, it is possible to harm their surviving interests. If one accepts Feinberg's argument, then Lucy Grealy's obituary can be seen as a particularly ironic example of death writing inflicting posthumous harm on its subject.

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