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Dog Days
Dog Days
unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence—where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can’t.
"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original."—Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and “Agnus Dei” played on repeat.
In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, “just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out”—otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find “the good story”: neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?
A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory—drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It’s a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm—Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.
Narrated by the author.
"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original."—Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and “Agnus Dei” played on repeat.
In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, “just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out”—otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find “the good story”: neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?
A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory—drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It’s a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm—Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.
Narrated by the author.
Audible Audio
Published June 10, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
November 30, 2025
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
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
Want to Read
June 3, 2026This sounds utterly fascinating...need to read this ASAP (this is mostly a reminder for future me)
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Substack | Bookstagram | BookTok | BookTube | Bookshop.org Store | Libro.fm Bonus Offer
May 10, 2026
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.”
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.”
February 24, 2026
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
June 9, 2026
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.
January 22, 2026
‘Giorgio Agamben says that Hegel says that Aristotle says[…]’ this really summarises it!
June 27, 2026
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.
December 19, 2025
“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.
June 23, 2026
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.
June 25, 2026
i am agape, speechless, jaw dropped and stunned
January 30, 2026
Dog Days is an excellent and multifarious meditation on trauma and memory, but above all it is a memoir about the very act of telling a story, especially one that attempts to navigate the slippery and ethically fraught terrain of the autobiographical. The book takes as its starting point a violent event that fractures the narrator’s life into a before and an after, but LaBarge resists any linear narrative of harm and recovery. Instead of offering a confessional arc or therapeutic closure, she dwells in the aftermath: the lingering symptoms of PTSD, the distortions of memory, the compulsive returns, and the difficulty of articulating an experience that resists coherence.
LaBarge is strikingly erudite, and her narrative intelligence is one of the book’s most compelling features. The text moves restlessly across genres and disciplines, drawing on literature, visual art, psychology, poetry, music, and film, not as ornamental references but as tools for thinking. These shifts produce a form that is deliberately unsettled and at times chaotic, mirroring the oscillating relationship between trauma, recovery, and repetition. The voice is vivacious, curious, and alert to contradiction, capable of moving from close bodily attention to cultural analysis without smoothing over the tensions between them. The result is a narrative that feels porous and alive, formally enacting the instability it describes.
In this sense, Dog Days works as a powerful example of autotheory as a method of inquiry rather than a genre label. Personal experience is neither isolated nor universalized; it becomes a site through which broader questions about memory, narrative authority, and meaning-making are tested. Writing itself emerges as both a symptom and a strategy: a way of circling trauma without mastering it, of acknowledging the limits of testimony while insisting on the necessity of speaking. LaBarge does not claim that storytelling heals, but she shows how writing can hold uncertainty, fragmentation, and doubt without resolving them. The book’s strength lies precisely in this refusal of closure, offering instead a formally inventive and intellectually rigorous exploration of what it means to live with trauma and to write from within its unresolved time.
LaBarge is strikingly erudite, and her narrative intelligence is one of the book’s most compelling features. The text moves restlessly across genres and disciplines, drawing on literature, visual art, psychology, poetry, music, and film, not as ornamental references but as tools for thinking. These shifts produce a form that is deliberately unsettled and at times chaotic, mirroring the oscillating relationship between trauma, recovery, and repetition. The voice is vivacious, curious, and alert to contradiction, capable of moving from close bodily attention to cultural analysis without smoothing over the tensions between them. The result is a narrative that feels porous and alive, formally enacting the instability it describes.
In this sense, Dog Days works as a powerful example of autotheory as a method of inquiry rather than a genre label. Personal experience is neither isolated nor universalized; it becomes a site through which broader questions about memory, narrative authority, and meaning-making are tested. Writing itself emerges as both a symptom and a strategy: a way of circling trauma without mastering it, of acknowledging the limits of testimony while insisting on the necessity of speaking. LaBarge does not claim that storytelling heals, but she shows how writing can hold uncertainty, fragmentation, and doubt without resolving them. The book’s strength lies precisely in this refusal of closure, offering instead a formally inventive and intellectually rigorous exploration of what it means to live with trauma and to write from within its unresolved time.
November 28, 2025
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.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Belated correspondence. A letter to the author. A close succession of close readings after the fact. *Death is the ultimate unreadable event…* but there are others, and how hard it is at times to read into our lives any good at all.
Strong correspondence. *… not meaning or exactitude but diffuse sensation and experience, a montage of pictures, dreams, hallucinations——visual antitheses that seem, nonetheless, quite right of their own universe.* Breathless associative undertaking, how do I relate to you? How do I relate to myself? Can we just talk, without all these words in the way? What am I like? Do you know?
Fearful correspondence. I am an inaccurate picture of myself. The story is nothing like the events. When is *the time for everything coming together?* It is now and now and now. Reality is nothing like life. I cannot come near to my body as it was, as it is, *as if that particular shape of my body is a cut-out, a deep chasm I could fall into if I approximate anything close.*
Trauma unmakes you and it is a collective effort to come together again. Good book, good effort.
Strong correspondence. *… not meaning or exactitude but diffuse sensation and experience, a montage of pictures, dreams, hallucinations——visual antitheses that seem, nonetheless, quite right of their own universe.* Breathless associative undertaking, how do I relate to you? How do I relate to myself? Can we just talk, without all these words in the way? What am I like? Do you know?
Fearful correspondence. I am an inaccurate picture of myself. The story is nothing like the events. When is *the time for everything coming together?* It is now and now and now. Reality is nothing like life. I cannot come near to my body as it was, as it is, *as if that particular shape of my body is a cut-out, a deep chasm I could fall into if I approximate anything close.*
Trauma unmakes you and it is a collective effort to come together again. Good book, good effort.
December 30, 2025
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.”
“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.”
June 22, 2026
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.
June 2, 2026
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.
June 27, 2026
what a fantastic collaboration and recognition of amazing authors and poets, who write about the issues of PTSD, trauma, and how the body and the mind coincide.
author, emily labarge, invites us into her memories and traumas of being held at gunpoint by evil terrorists.
a beautiful encapsulation of knowledge, science, and accounts from many author’s quotations, along with labarge’s personal story.
author, emily labarge, invites us into her memories and traumas of being held at gunpoint by evil terrorists.
a beautiful encapsulation of knowledge, science, and accounts from many author’s quotations, along with labarge’s personal story.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 21, 2026
An experimental exploration and meditation into the aftermath of trauma. Truly what I would consider a literary and cultural deep dive of what it means to tell (or not tell) what LaBarge refers to as “the good story”. A must read.
June 17, 2026
tis book is beautiful, it speaks to similar feelings i have had. it feels... too long. specific parts were gorgeous and the end was wonderful, but the middle cycles and lags which feels reminiscent of trauma itself: cycling and lagging. worth picking up tho
June 24, 2026
🥺
Just when I was reminded of Into the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, it got its mention <3 I only pray she knows “Futile Devices” by Sufjan Stevens…
This was my favorite read this year I think?
Just when I was reminded of Into the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, it got its mention <3 I only pray she knows “Futile Devices” by Sufjan Stevens…
This was my favorite read this year I think?
June 28, 2026
An intriguing quick read, as the author processes a traumatic event through extensive exploration of a psychotherapeutic understanding of Trauma, featuring Herman, and van der Kolk; films and literary works including Woolf, Didion and Nelson.
March 25, 2026
such a gorgeous piece of work. a refreshing yet deeply insightful telling of ptsd and how it affects one’s life, enriched by diverse cultural references
May 28, 2026
A deeply challenging book on multiple levels. The author has written a strange and structurally different genre bending memoir that expressed her post traumatic experiences brilliantly.
Want to Read
June 6, 2026nyt what to read June 2026
June 17, 2026
Usually like this kind of book but found it a bit of a struggle to get through.
Lots of interesting stuff and terrible trauma but it didn't all gel together for me.
Lots of interesting stuff and terrible trauma but it didn't all gel together for me.
June 21, 2026
A fascinating memoir about memoir/movies/ephemera as a means to try to understand and reconcile a terrifying, irreconcilable event.
June 6, 2026
Emily Labarge’s profound memoir examined the fear and consequential trauma that stemmed from an ordeal with her family when they were held hostage while on vacation during the Christmas season.
Based on my limited experience with them, I don‘t think I am fond of experimental memoirs. Labarge is a very smart woman, and I loved the quotes and philosophical ideas she shared. I also really connected with the rhythmic revelation of how poorly others respond to a person‘s pain. It’s just that what I really wanted from this was Emily‘s story, and this memoir seemed to deviate quite a bit from its purpose.
Based on my limited experience with them, I don‘t think I am fond of experimental memoirs. Labarge is a very smart woman, and I loved the quotes and philosophical ideas she shared. I also really connected with the rhythmic revelation of how poorly others respond to a person‘s pain. It’s just that what I really wanted from this was Emily‘s story, and this memoir seemed to deviate quite a bit from its purpose.
March 13, 2026
Loooooved this. An important exploration into trauma and how we tell our stories and how our stories are received. How we protect ourselves with stories. Stories are crucial to our survival
March 23, 2026
How to make a life in the aftermath of something that alters your body’s chemistry, your sense of security, and your understanding of how to move forward. Merely a moment is just that a moment, although it continues to consume LaBarge’s thoughts and fears for years. It’s not a constant trauma or one with any direct physical violence experienced by LaBarge, but one that plants a seed. A trauma, no matter if it’s “big” or “small,” if it’s even measurable, stays with you, or at least for Labarge, it does. As a writer, she creates a kaleidoscope of memory, psychology, theory, film, and writing to survive. A singular event can stop time and stay with you forever, but writing is a way to move forward alongside it.
February 10, 2026
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 amongst loved ones, though each is filled with kinds of stories, and the reasons for this are numerous
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews