“In This Bleak Abyss”: The Speculative Autobiographical Writings of Carmen María Machado and Esmé Weijun Wang

Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House (2019) and Esmé Weijun Wang's collection The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) are examples of autobiographical writing that incorporate and analyze speculative fiction as part of their retellings of difficult realities. Machado's memoir of domestic abuse and Wang's essays about her mental health show that speculative fiction can facilitate the navigation of traumatic events that resist narration. Both texts highlight how autobiographical writing becomes speculative as the author attempts to frame their lived experiences for a broader public, especially when their agencies within their own stories are questioned, either by a gaslighting abuser or by a public stigma against people with schizophrenia. By framing Machado's memoir and Wang's essays as speculative autobiographical writings, one can better understand the horrors, fantasies, dreams, and hallucinations that must be told to fully glimpse another's reality. References to speculative fiction and the narrating of realities that seem unreal highlight speculation's role in processing, narrating, and surviving trauma.