pathography

A biography that highlights the negative aspects of its subject's life.

Though this has been an era of magisterial biographies by such writers as Leon Edel, Richard Ellmann, Joseph Frank, Judith Thurman and Justin Kaplan, among others, it has also evolved a new subspecies of the genre to which the name "pathography" might usefully be given: hagiography's diminished and often prurient twin.

One would think there is little to be added, if only because of the avalanche of books — biographies, meta-biographies, pathographies (to borrow Joyce Carol Oates’s term), memoirs, critical studies, letters, journals, novels — that have been published about Plath since her suicide (which, for some people, is the only thing they know about her).

A biography that explores the effects of a disease on its subject's life.