Dog Days: A Memoir

by Emily Labarge

Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, an electrifying account of living with and writing about trauma from a singular new voice in Canadian literature.

Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident’s aftermath.

Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences—from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch—LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative.

Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving, a book unlike any other and one destined to become an essential text.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Essays, Biography, Audiobook, Womens

269 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 19, 2026

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

[sasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

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

[Stitching Ghost]

If I hadn't decided long ago to stop giving star ratings to memoirs, this book might have given me the idea. At times this memoir felt more like an essay on writing and anger than anything else but it was also very shifty in way that kept me a bit confused at all times. Labarge's references and approach to things should have made this one a hit with me—heck, she even references one of the very few films I actually have strong feelings about (Melancholia)—but I struggled to make myself pick it up until I had to either speed read it or return it to the library unfinished. If you're interested in unique memoirs that stray outside of the beaten path this one might be an interesting pick.

[Ryan T · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really conflicted on this one. The prose is hypnotic and pretty relentless. But with constant diversions and references being thrown out left and right, it can make for a pace that is full of fits and starts. This doublethink feeling pervades the whole project, and I honestly can’t imagine it working any other way , given the subject matter.

I think it’s well written and full of great ideas and beautifully intimate moments. But as a reading experience it was tough. Feels like a book that I’ll like better the second time around , once I get a firmer grasp on the “Good Story.”

[Aisling Coase · Rating 5 out of 5]

About the slipperiness between what happens and what we say or write down about what happens, and whether it matters that those two things are not the same. About the imposition of narrative on things that lack coherence. Good bibliography, great cover

[Jolanta (knygupė)]

3,5*
Kitokie, intelektualūs traumos memuarai, supinti su filmų, knygų, autorių ir kitų meno kūrinių analize. Knygai taikliai parinktas pavadinimas. Jis simbolizuoja būseną, kai viskas, kas blogiausia, tarsi liko praeityje, tačiau žmogui prasideda sunkus, alinantis ir, atrodo, niekada nesibaigiantis vidinis (iš)gyvenimas.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

This sounds utterly fascinating...need to read this ASAP (this is mostly a reminder for future me)

[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.

[Brian Hanson · Rating 2 out of 5]

They say it is beneficial to write out your trauma. Labarge has taken this to heart. What has emerged is a heady mix of trauma memoir and literary criticism, as the author searches the works of other authors for ways her experience can be put into words. Actually, it would be more accurate to say it is her response to a traumatic experience for which she is searching for words - the event itself being described quite adequately at the outset of the book. It is well meant, but left this reader unmoved by its inward spiralling. My bad, maybe.

[victoria marie]

Barthes is writing of photographs, but I begin to believe this is also how any moment or sequence in time works, how memory works: the mind is touched, marked, pierced, wounded, and the piqûre, the puncture, remains, maybe multiple, a nebula, it draws the eye, the heart, the soul, draws everything into it like a vortex. And what to do then, all turned inside out? Noli me tangere is another way of saying trauma, losses that have no shape or face, too immaterial for the rituals of mourning we have available. Something we cannot hold, some hole the darkness shines and shines through. (14)

*

at maybe, it must be, around 3: 00 a.m., maybe later. What time is it, time is over, The End. (17)

*

but actually who cares, I can’t feel anything, The End. (17)

*

You do not, actually, think that there is anything language cannot do, just things it will not do, because language is representational but it is also relational. The Schedule of Loss is what can be heard, what can be tolerated, what can be borne by both teller and told. (37)

*

—The Trauma. Perhaps the greatest euphemism of all of them, since it implies something singular and enclosed, when the reality is precisely opposite, no matter how you try to contain it. (38)

*

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. These are Joan Didion’s most famous words, and an oft-quoted palliative. But the majority of quoters omit the second part, which casts this fundamental narrativizing urge as something grasping and desperate: We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. (40)

*

After The Trauma, I have many “ideas” but none of them freezes anything at all, they barely catch the edges, colors, sounds, smells of the shifting phantasmagoria, let alone its images and narrative line, and so I read and read and read myself stories in order to live. […] In these stories I find proof of my faltering existence, of the states of being I have no words for yet, not really, never mind form—a distant dream. (40)

*

We miss important messages, symbols and signs, signs and symbols, because they can only be recognized later. Because meaning is accrued not bestowed, and this is the work of time and narrative. (108)

*

I love the locust tree the sweet white locust How much? How much? How much does it cost to love the locust tree in bloom? (179)

*

You could squint into the real night sky or look at photographs in books and online, try to see the big dog using Orion’s belt as a guide, or even the milky way, which runs right through the dog’s center like a glittering gust of wind, to locate that bright snout or breastbone, but the sky will outlast all of your attempts at mapping fixity, no matter how beautiful your lines and charts and equations, and the dog days will return every year without fail, and whether they last for weeks or months depends on whom you consult. The longest I’ve heard is 3 July to 7 September, but you can start to worry, I know, at any time, that it has gone inside of you, the malignant star, the searing heat, the pulling and the pulling, and that it might never leave. (185)

*

[…] and I remember how dangerous it is to believe things might be going well. The good story is not, as I had thought, over and distant. It is not enclosed, finished, contained or containable, as I had told myself, and it perhaps never will be. (186)

*

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 paralyzing 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. (196)

*

Semicolon, semicolon, semicolon, the list could go on; and on. The divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. If Woolf as Orlando (Orlando as Woolf ?) could think and feel and write this way, it’s not such a bad world, but it is without resolution. (197)

*

You need to see it, to feel it, to believe it. I am reaching for what Woolf describes as the “rapture” she gets in writing when the disjointed parts come together, when she sees the hidden pattern and knows that “the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art … we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.” (198)

*

I want to make something that is true, but I need to make it in order for it to be true. (I do not know what it is, having never seen anything like it before, writes Beckett of the colorful, uncategorizable geometries of the painter Bram van Velde, after also writing that an artist must confront “that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”) (200)

*

The hang up is that it cannot be hung up, frames only the blank space of the wall to which it’s affixed, but nonetheless occupies space far beyond itself, you can only get so close. The hang up is also artmaking and its expectations, which the artist here playfully upends. (200)

*

You do, however, actually, want to get even, and you can find many models for this in moving rather than still images. “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief,” writes Anne Carson in “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form,” the introduction to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, her translation of the Ancient Greek tragedian’s most famous plays—Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos, and Alkestis. (214)

*

“Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die,” writes Carson. “There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness.” What we might call catharsis, from the Greek kath-aros (pure) and katharein (cleanse), with its associations of purgation, release, purification. “Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much,” Carson asks and answers, introducing the tragic actor as a proxy—a grieving, avenging avatar who spares us risk, loss, death. The heroine’s protracted suffering allows ours, real or abstracted, to ebb, while also finding more extreme or intense manifestation. (216)

*

She will not escape, no matter what she does. She is a character, after all, but her narrative fate is clear long before it finally occurs, and we are made aware of its scripted nature. Narrative—beginning, middle, end—is meaningless: we watch already knowing what will happen, if not how, imprisoned in the manipulated time and space of the film. (219)

*

There is an inside and an outside of the frame and there is a hang up. I have a hang up, and the hang up is maybe writing, maybe language, maybe subjectivity, maybe context, maybe all of the above. The hang up curves out from the frame, around and through the space where the image should be, into the realm of the viewer, the reader, the witness, the narrator, the storyteller, the oracle. It reenters the frame and disappears. (230)

*

I wonder if I have missed something and the pulling pain is also the drilling, the boring of one hole after another in language. The pulling pain is the relational world reconstituting itself and waiting for me to catch up. I who make my profession of mute things. (238)

*

like what Beckett thinks might be the “something paralyzingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of other arts.” He closes the letter to Kaun: Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as, for example, the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence? An answer is requested. The unnature of the word, the dissolution of the word surface. (239)

*

The word surface is for scraping, puncturing, wounding, covering with scum and detritus, drilling hole after hole. (241)

*

If you can’t see that you’re already dead, in so many ways, maybe even died on the second day of May, 1945, at ten after four of the clock, British Double Summer Time, if not before or after, then you have to stay here, in the old world, where time moves backward or, worse, at a precise and predictable pace: sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a years. Here, you can know yourself completely. Here, you alone tell your story. Here, is linear and accurate. Here, the borders of responsibility are crisp and clearly defined. Here, you are forever individual. Here, we say it has always been so, but it has not. It has not. (242)

*

The Good Story may be every story you write, but the Good Story is also not your story. The closer you get to its end, the hotter the dog days, the more feverish you are to give it away entirely, to say you never had a Good Story at all, to say that yours is hers, his, mine, ours, theirs, and that there is no other way. The world is not dazzling because it is singular. We are already dead because our souls are eternal. An answer is requested. (242)

*

“I would like heaven to be a place where I can go and talk to Paul Klee. Together we will look at circles and see dots in them and in the dots we will discover universes and we would visit within them all the houses he has painted,” (246)

*

to earn it by “confronting with passion the conundrum of life,” as James Baldwin writes in The Fire Next Time. “One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” It is dialogue, it is questions posed and left unanswered, for instance, Mary Oliver, who asks you, the reader, which is also her, the writer, in “Poem 133: The Summer Day,” Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? (255)

*

as Hughes bestowed it upon the work of Plath, “the flame and the rose folded together.” Even then, he didn’t understand her final collection ended not with death but birth (or at the very least exhumation, Lady Lazarus style): “The bees are flying. / They taste the spring.” (257)

[Malaena · Rating 5 out of 5]

highlight highlight im highlighting the whole book. a book that i set down and immediately want to reread. probably will reread it once more before the end of the year. a book i want to get tattooed on my body. a book that makes me question how the hell am i supposed to write something when something like this exists out there. i loved it so much. one of the best books i have ever read in my life. i wish i could experience this book again for the first time.

[Alix · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book isn't really about the traumatic event that happened to the author, but rather about how one writes about trauma or reconciles it through language. Throughout the text, she experiments with different formats and references other works of literature and film. It's interesting, but I also found it quite slow and the constant shifts in topic didn't always work for me. Overall, this wasn't the easiest reading experience since it's highly experimental, but I think there's a lot to appreciate here.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the collage, diary, second & third draft style of this book. More authors should just pull direct quotes and discuss others’ writing in their own memoirs. I would pair this with Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman for anyone who is interested in crime victimhood and trauma.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Picked up by God is something radiant that comes into you, I say. It is when you see the world as it is. When everything lines up. When the insides of things glitter. When you can see the veins shining. When Truth loves you. When you are the arrow. When you know what no one else does. When you are on a higher plane and you can see the whole expanse. Running out of examples that don’t sound concerning, I say, finally, it is like when you figure out the structure of an essay, a book, a song, a film, whatever, when all the pieces fall into place and they just fit and you can tell and you’re ready to start. When I say that, he nods and looks like he understands completely.”

I'll confess I'm not usually one who loves a trauma memoir, but this was handled with such intellectual rigor, delicacy, and depth of feeling. Emily LaBarge untangles an episode from years prior (being held hostage at gunpoint for a day with her family while on an island vacation) and what it means to her existence in time. Compelling and sensitively written. Thanks to Catherine Lacey for the recommendation, whose recommendations I will always take.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dog Days requires a lot from its reader, and I wasn't always able to do the work required to fully "get it." Sometimes I would be fully locked in, annotating and rereading, and other times (was it me? was it the writing? was I distracted or was it genuinely so scattered and obtuse as to make it difficult to follow?) I would find myself having to go back several pages because I had been reading without comprehension. I read this on an ereader and realized right away that it required a more tactile experience, so I ordered a physical copy that I'll use to read this one again. Because it deserves a reread. It's inventive and dense and original. It just wasn't 100% for me at this moment.

[Ellie Hanjian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book about trauma AND ottawa?? Double homicide!!!

[Melisse Gelula · Rating 5 out of 5]

MEMOIRING BOOK CLUB AUGUST 2026 PICK

Dog Days is an uncommon, virtuosic blend of criticism and memoir. (In the UK the book was published as an essay.) Its approach to writing about trauma gives it foundation-stone status for this moment in which memoir readers, but mostly writers, struggle with honoring and problematizing the trauma plot. I loved it and know it’s a book that I’ll reach for and re-read again and again.

[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.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A heavy book, thematically—PTSD and trauma are the central subject, but they seemed surrounded by a broader and harder to articulate depression or mental anguish that existed beyond the trauma itself, if that makes any sense. It’s also just hard to read: dense, HEAVILY intertextual, so much so that at times I just wanted to go read Plath and watch it’s a wonderful life and leave this profoundly referential/ekphrastic era in publishing behind. I really struggled to latch on for the first 100 pages or so and nearly bailed. But!! By part 3, I was on board—it helped me to reconceptualize the book for myself as an Essay in the traditional sense and as almost academic or a work of theory, synthesizing a framework for writing trauma built on collective voices and a refusal of tidy stories/closure/ the I of memoir. I’m not sure I’m ready to adopt that fully for myself—I need to think on it more—but it’s totally provocative. Add it to the trauma canon!

[Autumn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can you marry a book?

Slow start for me, but good heavens does she break open what we talk about when we talk about trauma narratives. Unbelievable. Not one that hit immediately but geez I cannot stop thinking about this.

Lynch. Powell and Pressburger. Freud. It’s got it all.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most interesting non fiction books I’ve read and an incredible look into trauma. Relatively depressing overall because of its vulnerability but insanely revealing.

[Weiling · Rating 5 out of 5]

The evening of December 22, 2009 changed LaBarge’s life forever. Six armed men broke into the vacation home she and her family were renting on a Caribbean island. The family was held hostage at gunpoint for hours while Mrs. Doubtfire and “Agnus Dei” played on repeat. The local authorities performed an investigation but the case never came to a close. One intruder was the young son of a police department official. Days passed and the family flew back to Ottawa. But the near-death experience was hard to talk about. Some dry humor skipped across the conversations. It was even harder to name — “That Awful Thing That Happened,” “The Incident,” “The Trauma,” “The Event,” or simply but not simply, “IT.”

When the trauma is so impossible to name, how could one relate it to others? Summarizing the incident for context’s sake is not doing it justice. The summary lays out some facts — time, location, people involved, and actions taken. But these are for the listener, the outsider of the trauma, not the teller who is also the victim. The “Good Story,” told to the listening ear, presumes a coherence of time (beginning, process, ending) and, in its priority of others, locks the teller in her backrooms of subconsciousness, doubt, amnesia, and fractured and fallible memory. The required coherence of language in relating the trauma forces it into a narrative that is antagonistic to the narration of trauma. “Trauma,” writes LaBarge, “along with its recovery, is the ultimate experience of both this will last forever and this will happen again anytime and anywhere.”

This sensation of the event is epically connected to David Lynch’s films, Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks in particular. “In the Lynchian universe something is always happening or threatening to happen or happening again…The Lynchian event is ongoing, protracted, diffuse…The event is everywhere and nowhere—in the threat of the whirring ceiling fan, the changing traffic lights, the crashing waterfall, the dark road illuminated by headlights, the abandoned railway carriages, the stacked logs.”

How do we describe an event that defies both time and space, memory and amnesia, association and dissociation, adrenaline and nothingness? What are we talking about when we are talking about trauma with it being a black hole of language? Doesn’t each recollection return us to the trauma and therefore extend it to colonize the unfolding present — or, besiege the present in repetition? “Trauma is a narrative problem,” LaBarge repeats again and again, “because it is polyvocal, includes everyone you know and many whom you don’t,” “because it traffics first and foremost in uncertainty,” “because there is no story.” In pondering these questions, we might come to think that time doesn’t heal the wound. But if we engage in narrating the trauma and this engagement, this attempt, lays a thin layer of false certainty of what happened, we might develop a willingness to believe in our created narrative that might occasionally or temporarily overcome the sense of guilt that by telling of the trauma as a story, we are letting go of the most unnarratable part.

In the days and weeks after I unexpectedly birthed our stillborn child in a hotel room, I retold my trauma to many friends and family members who just learned of and celebrated the good news of her expected arrival. The contraction, the waterbreak, the umbilical cord, the ambulance, the emergency room, the maternity ward, the blood test and ultrasound, the bureaucracy of autopsy, the difficulty with the national border, the negotiation with the funeral home…The more I relate the traumatic event that relies on these concrete signposts as structure, the more I feel that I am reciting someone else’s story. In this recitation, the free fall into deprivation, the choking disbelief of her absence, the endless grief that strikes me over and over like simultaneous senses of the loss of gravity and deep water pressure, the anguish of feeling being lied to by fate and trapped in a frustrating fiction of a counterfeited self — all of these are reduced and shrunken into a pale verb in its past tense, “cried.”

To “recover” — another fiction I’ve derived from the ongoing one — I plunged myself into reading. Oftentimes I caught myself staring at the same sentence and not processing its meaning. My mind was blank but also occupied. I was thinking of nothing and everything at the same time. All of the nothingness and everythingness were (and will always be) related to our child. Every sight and sound drifts towards her, vacated with meaning. I find my voice merges into LaBarge’s, a doubled voice: “I cannot focus and find it difficult to read, but I cannot remember if I used to feel differently, or what differently used to feel like. It seems to me I may have always felt and been and thought this way, a timeless nothing.” What was it like when I couldn’t focus on reading before? Were the paragraphs and pages inhabited by other meanings or meaninglessness? I can’t remember. If I can’t remember, does (trying to recover) the before still matter? If I just keep asking questions that don’t desire an answer, will she come back at one point when I least expect her?

Robert Jay Lifton, one of the many writers LaBarge cited, understands how “those who experience disaster often afterward have the sense of a ‘counterfeit’ world. Nothing is as it seems, nothing ever was.” As I write this review, I am sitting in my parents’ apartment, a whole globe away from my own house, wondering whose body and whose present I am inhabiting, or in-habiting. In John Dewey’s philosophy, to enact an experience, one’s “doing” is encompassed by what one is “undergoing,” hence literally inside a habit, habitat, and habituation. Dewey was theorizing the spontaneity of experience. But what if the habit and habitat are a world counterfeited because I chose the story of departure and diaspora and returned over and over again as someone whose identity keeps modifying? Now the latest “undergoing” that evokes modification is a trauma. To be inside (“doing”) my origin habit and habitat still undergone by my family requires me to borrow a body that can still be accepted in this habit/at, a body that I cannot resolve my distance with but nevertheless collapse into. Who is being lied to?

The borrowed body is expected to demonstrate coherence in itself and in the autobiographical narrative it inhabits. It is supposed to feel more real than its borrower. “Autobiographical narratives are part of a compulsion to resolve the unresolvable, destined to chase what cannot (should not?) be caught,” writes LaBarge. The borrowed body, the “more real” self, tells the “Good Story” of progress out of grief and melancholy in the dog days (literally, July in Asia). The “Good Story” dictates that the trauma is tolerable because it is finite. But the hostage wants to disagree, saying the opposite is true. Bessel van der Kolk (in The Body Keeps the Score), quoted by LaBarge, reminds us that what makes a traumatic experience intolerable is that it undoes the closure. The denial of closure removes any linear chronological order. Any moment or signpost (content) in the event of trauma can be picked up anytime to be the opening of yet another experience of the trauma (form).

But do we give up writing about trauma altogether? “Does it matter if the story, and the story inside the story, and the story inside that story, is a lie if the words help? And which words, exactly, do help?” Trauma is a negative matter impossible to locate. Words are positive symbols reliant on their locations to make normative meanings. Their antagonism determines that words need to keep generating space, air, or energy around them to create not linguistic coherence, but a habit/at in which the bereft, the deprived, the violated can reconcile with what she undergoes. Rather than a selfish act of insulation, this is a Joycean invitation to join the haunting and ineffable:

“I am sitting at my desk pushing words around,” reflects LaBarge. “Pushing words against each other. Leaving holes and blanks and inviting you in because if the plague is in all of us and we are in fact dead, my mortality is yours and we live through every time and space together, whether we may have died, or may be waiting to die, or not.”

[Bridget H]

Read this very slowly all summer long. Feels ghoulish to rate. An extremely challenging work!

“Trauma is a narrative problem because there is no story. There is no story in the mind or in the body, not in a police report or on a new passport application, not in a therapist's chair or on a page or even among loved ones, though each is filled with kinds of stories, and the reasons for this are numerous.”

[Brandyyy · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a very profound memoir of the author trying to come to terms with a traumatic event that occurred to her and her family while vacationing in the carribbean
the hours of being under captivity in a place they deemed temporary theirs and safe altered everyone differently, but for Labarge it changed the way she was able to live in the world moving forward. this book is narrated by her obviously, but you can also see interlinked; art discussions, expert explanations and other similar anecdotes found in books and media that Labarge breaks apart and uses in oder to find the answers and closure she is searching for. This was a very mind opening look for me on how trauma seems to affect certain people and you can really see her struggling in passages like this one:
"I hear myself, during these months and years agreeing or producing convivial answers that I don’t believe , producing more and more secrets . It gets hard to keep track of them , how they will all be contained ,if they will turn into a rolling ball of shame .I start keeping secrets about secrets, some of which are secrets from myself about the ways I have managed to survive.”
she dives into the difficult emotions that came with the event such as shame:
As Herman writes :
“Intense and barely controllable urges and emotions make people feel crazy and make people feel like they don’t belong to the human race .As a result shame becomes the dominant emotion an hiding the truth the the central preoccupation ."
and then some of the bleak possible answers she investigates; that maybe what happened was a tragedy but unfortunately she just has to continue this almost unlivable life :
“ What happens if you thought and felt and experienced everything that you would right before you died in reality but then, continued to live. What if death was no longer an inconceivable concept but an assimilable reality of unreality - a double a shadow inside life ..people could see that there was something wrong with you, that you had one foot in the grave? What if time ended when that hole, that non. Death death , was torn in the universe , in your brain, and then started again but you were not born anew , instead lived backwards and forwards at the same time or, even , some days, did not live at ll."

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seeing/Reading more memoir in this format lately (the observable universe, the salt of the universe). Interesting and at some times compelling. A lit review on trauma in a way…

“Life goes on, but in two or more temporal directions at once”

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really, really excited for this book. Unfortunately all of the references to so many other artists and authors did not resonate with me at all and made me wonder what this author really had to say.

[Riley T · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is intellectual and dissects the effects of trauma in a fascinating way. I loved all the socio-cultural references and the cyclical nature of the story that reflected the cyclical nature of trauma and PTSD.

[Kaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It has to be a miracle instead of an obscenity, I decide, but how.”

[✿ · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am agape, speechless, jaw dropped and stunned

[Ashton Dudley]

picked this up from the new releases stack at the word is change in bed stuy (perhaps the worlds best book store). I love auto theory and memoir and the first half of this completely knocked me flat, but it lost traction towards the end. would recommend because she’s making some quite fascinating choices some of which work and some don’t. giving her grace as it’s a debut and I look forward to seeing what she does next.