Dog Days

by Emily Labarge

Dog Days considers why we tell stories the way we do, and how we might tell them otherwise. Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, it begins with a personal trauma - the account of how Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009 - but looks outwards as much as inwards for answers. Skilful and controlled, but also searching and febrile, this is a book that unsettles time and narrative, art and imagination, embodying in form the trauma that it describes. Taking in writers and artists from Vivian Gornick to Robert Burton, David Lynch to Sylvia Plath, LaBarge picks apart the structures of narrative forms to ask how it might be possible to tell the 'Good Story', and its aftermath, on its own terms.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir

Kindle Edition

Published October 16, 2025

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredibly compelling, unconventional memoir that blends meditation with interrogations of time, memory, trauma and narrative. Writer, academic and cultural critic Emily LaBarge is someone who has experienced, what she calls, an Event. In 2009, in her mid-twenties LaBarge travelled with her sister and parents to a Caribbean island to spend the Christmas holidays in a rented villa. On the 22nd of December their vacation home was invaded by six men armed with guns and machetes. LaBarge and her family spent eight hours face down on the floor while these men ransacked the house, pausing to eat cake and watch the video of Mrs Doubtfire that had been playing when they arrived. For all of this time LaBarge assumed that she wouldn’t escape this situation, that her death was a certainty. But her survival came with its own not inconsiderable challenges. For the next decade or so, LaBarge found herself haunted by this Event, unable to find ‘closure’ – if there even is such a thing. She moved several times, tried therapy but still existed in a state of hypervigilance, plagued by anxiety and persistent insomnia. But, at the same time, she was reminded that, as a writer, at least she had a ‘good story.’

It's this idea of the ‘good story’ that forms the basis of her explorations here. She refuses to adhere to standard approaches to writing about violence and trauma, she doesn’t want to sensationalise or sentimentalise her experience for profit. Nor does she want to perpetuate myths around this experience as automatically having some greater purpose. LaBarge makes a living lecturing and writing about art, literature and film, forms of storytelling that raise questions about structure, perspective, notions of representation versus reality. She examines her physical and emotional state based on this background, bringing in the work of Virginia Woolf, Freud, David Lynch, Nabokov, Plath and others. She watches films about memory and trauma like Waltz with Bashir over and over again. She reads about trauma and the body; she follows debates around the nature of time and how it’s affected by the kind of violent rupture created by something like the Event. Attempting not so much to make sense of what happened to her but to examine sense-making itself, processes of interpretation, concepts around meaning and truth. She’s particularly interested in how language shapes rather than reflects experience.

Her work here often reminded me of Maggie Nelson as well as Mary Ruefle. It’s dense and abstract but also deeply intimate, fertile and richly associative. It’s also, for anyone whose life history doesn’t conform to normative expectations, highly relatable. LaBarge considers, for example, the ways in which conversation operates as part of a process of social bonding something which is undermined when, like her, you’re faced with lying or obfuscating rather than revealing aspects of your past that others might find troubling or unsettling - or can't face fielding reactions that can range from unpleasantly voyeuristic to trite and patronising. It’s a demanding piece requiring its reader both to focus and to shift as LaBarge shifts between moments and between topics. But I found it extraordinarily gripping and intelligent. Equal parts illuminating and quietly devastating.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Transit Books for an ARC

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is horrible, but what is really horrible is how ordinary it is. The violence has not endowed the house with any spectacular or unusual qualities. It is exactly the same as before, just ruined.” There is much to admire in Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days, from its even-eyed surveying of personal trauma to its masterful weaving of other media — writing, film, art – into something coherent, analytical, and deeply affecting. LaBarge tells us that, in 2009, six men broke into the home she and her family were renting for the Christmas holidays, and held the family hostage for hours while ransacking the place. This sets into motion not only an unsurprisingly difficult time dealing with PTSD, but a complicated attempt at narrativisation and intellectualisation: how to turn this incident into “the Good Story”, the most digestible, most coherent version of the story for others to hear and understand. “The good story is the story of how to reach that particular tale even as it exceeds the sum of its parts. What do I, as a person, and then as a writer, do with this information and that and this and this and that, which includes the list of horrible things? I put *person* first in that equation, but many days I believe it comes second if at all: as a *writer*, what do I do with this information?” LaBarge’s writing is deft and undaunted by the abyss it’s staring into, laying out, autopsying etc. — in fact she plays an impressive tightrope act in which she captures perfectly her disrupted mental state, alongside and in between her clear exegesis of trauma as a narrative problem. For all its darkness, it’s dazzling — on a personal level, it gave me much to think (and write) about regarding my own trauma, from when my family was attacked in our home nineteen years ago, and for that alone I’d rate it highly. But even aside from my revelations and reflections, I think it’s an alchemical book, expertly crafted by LaBarge, and one to think about for time to come.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this memoir, Emily Labarge meditates on the experience of trauma, and how it leaves those who experience it unmoored in time, with a lose of a sense of self. In 2009, Labarge, along with her parents and sister, were held captive by men with guns and machetes, in a house her family had rented on an idyllic tropical island. In the years following this trauma, Labarge struggles to situate herself within linear time, and struggles to hold onto a sense of self. In Dog Days she explores her own experience, discussing how hard it is to explain trauma in a conventional narrative, and uses other texts, such as novels, short stories, films, and music, to situate herself within a history of people who have experienced trauma, and how that has impacted their psyches. This is an assured, imaginative book, in which Labarge takes care to examine different aspects of trauma, and creates a considered nonlinear narrative about her own experiences, and how those are different from, and overlap with, the experiences of others. I found this an impressive, exploratory work, and admired the way in which Labarge plays with form and language.

[Maddie Magner · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much about trauma as it is about hope. I will revisit I’m sure. 🧡

“Trauma is a narrative problem because first of all there's the blank page, and the doubt of the trauma writer and the doubt of the trauma victim can become one and the same, fuel each other in a paralysing ouroboros. Who cares? (Who cares?) Does it matter? (Does it matter?) Am I making something of nothing?
(Am I making something of nothing?) Who do you think you are? (Who do you think you are?) You can't tell which voice is which. (You can't tell which voice is which.) This is also the doubt of the self, never stable in any case.”

[sasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

‘Giorgio Agamben says that Hegel says that Aristotle says[…]’ <- this really summarises it!