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It is these sorts of insights — exploring his fallibility, his shortcomings and even his complicity in an uncaring system — that make Marsh’s writing so powerful and that allow him to transcend the usual pathography.

Michiko Kakutani, reviewing “Sons of Camelot” in The New York Times in 2004, called the book a “group pathography that dwells predictably on death, dysfunction and bad luck.”

But responsible biographers never set out to produce hagiography or pathography.

“Then She Fell” addresses the ambiguity of that relationship, but without drifting into the polluted shallows of pathography.

Set entirely in a hotel room in London not long before Garland’s death in 1969, “Rainbow” is theater as pathography.