Renegotiating Epistemic Authority: Narrative Mediation and Relational Knowledge in Twenty-First-Century Family Memoirs of Schizophrenia

Through a narratological and comparative analysis inspired by rhetorical narratology (Phelan 1996), this paper examines how narrative mediation in two memoirs written by mothers of people diagnosed with schizophrenia – Dominique Laporte’s Mon fils, schizophrène (2008) and Josie Méndez-Negrete’s A Life on Hold (2015) – is deployed to renegotiate epistemic authority over this mental illness. More specifically, I reconfigure Arthur Frank’s concept of “witnessing” (1995; 2013) as a mediating practice through which psychotic experiences difficult to communicate can be partially narrated and shared. Two types of narrative mediation, which I term hypodiegetic and intertextual witnessing, are thus presented as forms of witnessing through which relational knowledge of schizophrenia emerges. Rhetorical narratology is instrumental in interpreting instances of narrative mediation as forms of “local fictionality” (Nielsen et al. 2015) functioning rhetorically to convey a relational understanding of schizophrenia shaped by interactions between psychiatrists, caregivers, and patients. Esmé Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) serves as a comparative generic framework illustrative of autotheory (Fournier 2022; Kulbaga and Spencer 2025) through which to consider the epistemic value of family memoirs for depicting relational selves and relational knowledge of schizophrenia. By moving beyond the patient-focused recovery narrative (Woods et al. 2022), I argue that family illness memoirs contribute to renegotiating epistemic authority in shaping knowledge about schizophrenia.