Akademik

(aw.toh.PATH.aw.gruh.fee; TH as in thin)

n.

An autobiography that is inspired by or that focuses on a disease or disorder that afflicts the author. (A blend of autobiography and pathology.)

Clad in head-to-toe black, Rochelle Newman struts onto a darkened stage, sizes up the audience, then announces matter-of-factly: "I was a fat kid."

It's hard to imagine Newman, a fit 42-year-old with shoulder-length auburn hair, as a "size 14 at age 14" — and equally difficult to picture her as the 90-pound anorexic she soon became. Oddest of all, perhaps, is that Newman has chosen to tell her story not in the form of a mawkish movie of the week or an angry "autopathography" displayed at Borders, but as an unsentimental solo show.

— Lori Gottlieb, "Out of the deep end," Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2003

The Boston Globe makes USA Today founder Al Neuharth's list of the country's 10 best newspapers in his newly released autopathography, "Confessions of an SOB."

— Alex Beam, "Bonfire of the vanity," The Boston Globe, September 25, 1989