G. Thomas Couser received his doctorate in American Civilization at Brown University in 1977. After teaching English at Connecticut College, he moved on to Hofstra University, where he founded and directed a Disability Studies Program. From his dissertation on, his scholarship has been concerned with autobiography and memoir, especially with life writing stimulated by disability and illness and the ethics of life writing.

His academic books include Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997), Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (2004), Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (2009), and Memoir: An Introduction (2012). He has also published dozens of articles and book chapters.

In addition to scholarship, he has published personal essays in the Southwest Review, New Haven Review, and Hudson Review and Letter to My Father: A Memoir (2017).

Chapter 1. Prologue: Death and Life Writing: Reflections on My Morbid Career

Chapter 2. Introduction: The Work of Memoir

Chapter 3. Quality-of-life Writing: Illness, Disability, and Contemporary American Memoir

Chapter 4. Is There a Body in this Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography

Chapter 5. Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation

Chapter 6. Memoir and (Lack of) Memory: Filial Narratives of Paternal Dementia

Chapter 7. Paper Orphans: Writers' Children Write Their Lives

Chapter 8. Filiation in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father."

Chapter 9. Disability, Depression, Diagnosis, and Harm: Reflections on Two Personal Scenarios

Chapter 10. Vulnerable Subjects: Caveat Scriptor

Chapter 11. The Shape of Death in American Autobiography

Chapter 12. On "Freedom Writing": Expression and Repression

Chapter 13. Life in Letters: Letters as Life