Resumen: Death and autobiography have been closely associated since the beginning of life writing studies. From Paul De Man's seminal article "Autobiography as De-facement" (1979), we have been aware of the "restoration of mortality by autobiography" (930). Furthermore, different scholars have dealt with the idea of death as prompting "scriptotherapy", that is to say, the need to write as part of the process of healing or consolation before imminent death. As Susanna Egan explains, the "ultimate, or foundational, relationship of life with death has always been important to autobiography" (Egan 12).
Specifically, much recent autobiography deals with terminal illness, the process of dying and the facts of death. In fact, life-writing genres that specifically deal with the experience of death are proliferating in a variety of forms, visual and verbal, digital and non-digital, etc. In the wake of the memoir boom, we find autothanatographies (also called end-of-life memoirs or death memoirs), narratives of aging, illness memoirs, etc, which often function as counter-narratives in a Western culture of denial.
