title: Telling stories about illness and disability: the limits and lessons of narrative.
abstract: Autobiographical narratives of illness and disability are influential in popular and medical discourses of illness and disability, in part because these narratives represent illness and disability within a sociocultural context, intersecting with other categories of difference. Clinicians can benefit patients through a critical understanding of the formal and social conventions that shape illness and disability narratives and the effect these conventions can have on the lived experience of illness and disability. I analyze the 2003 edition of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face to illustrate these socio-narrative conventions, especially in light of an afterword that significantly revises the ending to Grealy's narrative. I explore the parallels between narrative conventions-such as the "recovery narrative"-and caregivers' expectations that shape the role of the "good patient," as well as the resistance to conventions of closure, represented by the "renegotiated ending."
authors.affiliation: Bioethics and Humanities, Upstate Medical University, 618 Irving Avenue, Syracuse, NY 13210, USA. gardenr@upstate.edu
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Garden
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D001294:Attitude to Health; D017028:Caregivers / Q000523:psychology; D006233:Persons with Disabilities / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D033262:Narration; D010361:Patients / Q000523:psychology*; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations