Dog Days - by Emily Labarge (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"A stunning memoir."--Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

A NEW YORK TIMES AND LIT HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK - A JUNE ABA INDIE NEXT PICK

Dog Days unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence--where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can't.

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 practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.

Review Quotes

"A stunning memoir, ingenious. It's a testament to LaBarge's gifts as a writer that she can make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive... Dog Days begins with the lonely violence of waiting to die with a crocheted blanket over her head and ends with a commitment to engage with the world. 'What happens to you happens to me happens to everyone and everything': We all share the stubborn fact of our mortality."--Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

"A book that really should not be skipped."--Joumana Khatib, The New York Times

"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

"For the individual, trauma is experienced as utterly singular, but--Dog Days reminds us--the tale we tell ourselves and others of it should not perpetuate our isolation... We all are subject to sorrow, love, violence, joy, and death; the attempt to make intelligible the particularities of our experiences of these conditions is what solidifies and enlivens our relation to a shared world. It is what we recognize in others, and what renders us recognizable to them."--Jamie Hood, Bookforum

"A restless experiment in ways of telling, by turns hectic and languorous, echoing the dilations of time LaBarge experiences... It is less about what happened to her than how she might tell it; about the mysterious, alchemical process of writing, the transubstantiation of living into language."--Meghan Racklin, The New Republic

"The representation of a luminous, well-read mind relinquishing the need to make sense of life through a conventional narrative."--Sophie Poole, The Nation

"A roving, erudite text... LaBarge's analyses are so clean and compelling that she is almost over my shoulder, directing my attention here and then there."--Rebecca Peng, Toronto Review

"A jarring, vivid account of the million and one ways of telling an untellable story."--Maris Kreizman

"A memoir, exploded... one that turns the blurred lens of memory and trauma back on the reader."--Spencer Williams, The Chicago Review of Books

"[Dog Days] turns to the potential of language as it fractures along an act of violence, reorienting us to ourselves and how that self might be more fully expressed."--Noah Britton, The Brooklyn Rail

"Emily LaBarge renders trauma as a lived experience, and so Dog Days is not merely a trauma study, of which there are many, but also a unique literary experience. Dog Days is rich in ideas. A fascinating work, unusually conceived and written, disturbing, honest, and profound."--Lynne Tillman

"An enactment of the struggle to translate trauma into language... You haven't read anything like it."--Literary Hub

"A singular mix of memoir and criticism."--Publishers Weekly

"Haunting and questing meditations on life, art, dreams, and death... A trauma narrative that extends and subverts the very notion of trauma narrative."--Kirkus Reviews

"Dog Days is a book about the relentless presentness of the past and the philosophical vertigo that follows a harrowing life-altering event. What emerges is a profound and necessary inquiry into how we assemble a self from the fragments of what we've read, what we've seen, and what we've survived."--Anne Boyer, author of The Undying

"Emily LaBarge is always intellectually agile and emotionally capacious."--Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

"Embracing disorientation as a formal strategy, Dog Days locates a sympathy between traumatic experience and the practice of writing itself...[LaBarge] demonstrates that trauma entails its own mystical mode of reading, in which words and images become imbued with supra-rational connection and significance."--Daisy Lafarge, Frieze

"An expansive, invigorating and compassionate book. LaBarge analyses a wide-range of art and literature with a deftness, boldness and generosity that reminded me of the best Susan Sontag. I look forward to pressing this into the hands of all my friends."--Rebecca Birrell, author of This Dark Country

"An extraordinary work of writing; a profound odyssey of bringing into the shared space of language what dwells beyond its margins. The writing illuminates architectures of pain, repetition, and shifting temporalities, in a singular light that somehow manages to make the great fiction, poetry, film, art, it reflects upon even richer. A book that has such intensely stunning passages that I miss as soon as I have finished reading them."--Tai Shani

"Where the worst shocks of life threaten to undermine thought, imagination and literary form, Dog Days patiently, ferociously, insists on new ways to think, imagine and write. I plan to re-read it every time I feel my mind go soft. I found it a challenge, an inspiration--a very cool book."--Amber Husain

"An expansive and beautiful meditation on trauma and its styles, but also how reading and looking and gathering and writing, as a practice of co-creation with the perceptual, sustains our existence--this too is lived experience."--Lucy Mercer

About the Author

Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, The London Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days is her first book.