Dog Days by Emily LaBarge
It’s often assumed that to write a good memoir, a writer must have something happen to them. Something big, juicy, and traumatic. Something unbelievable that really happened to you. Emily LaBarge is here to critique this idea.
In her memoir, Dog Days, LaBarge challenges the idea that writing a ‘trauma narrative’ is an act of healing, portraying it instead as a messy unravelling with her experimental and unique prose.
Dismantling the ‘Good Story’
LaBarge is a writer, an art and literary critic, and she did experience something very traumatic. She and her family were held hostage for hours by six men who broke into their tropical rental house while they were on vacation one Christmas. No one was injured, but LaBarge finds her thoughts return to that experience often, haunting her. Instead of giving us the full story, LaBarge gives us the reality of what it’s like to live through and write about trauma.
Dog Days’ disorienting narrative deals with the difficulty of piecing together into a cohesive narrative and how easy it is to overanalyze and shift your story to fit into the widely accepted studies and stories of traumas, large and small. Referring to her experience as ‘It’ or the ‘Good Story,’ she demonstrates how her trauma seems to take on a life of its own. How it wants to be told, but she is dreadfully unsure of how to tell it. She faces the temptation to shape her lived experience into a ‘Good Story,’ a story that fits into the reality that both trauma writers and trauma readers want.
Trauma As…
LaBarge’s narrative style brings an unsettling anxiety to this experience. The narrative voice resembles a hyper-vigilant consciousness. It becomes increasingly disorienting as every topic bleeds into the next.
She explores trauma and memory, trauma as a trend, the psychology of trauma, and, most of all, trauma as a narrative. This exploration catalogs her spiraling response. It’s how she sleeps, how she writes, how she perceives time and space. And it’s not just how she does these things; she then goes further, analyzing how sleep, writing, time and space have been experienced scientifically and artistically, in studies, in books, in research and in art.
As a result, Dog Days becomes less of a memoir, instead resembling something between a cultural criticism, an essay and an account of LaBarge’s experience unpacking and writing this book.
We Are What We Consume
In dancing around the ‘Good Story,’ LaBarge’s memoir ends up a sharp critique of how much we have normalized, even glamorized trauma. What happened to LaBarge’s family, what really happened to them, is akin to images we see every day on TV and in movies, what we read about in thriller books and listen to on True Crime podcasts. No one ever thinks these things will happen to them. No one thinks these things really happen. It’s all a little hard to believe. LaBarge shows that when it does happen to you, it’s even harder to believe. The truth and the memories become fuzzy.
LaBarge connects her story to the trauma stories of others. Using studies and research, as well as the experiences and words of writers like Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson and Carmen Maria Machado, she deciphers how she feels through the lens of how others have felt before.
I felt one of the most fascinating elements of Dog Days was how much it demonstrated that when we read or consume anything, it becomes a part of us. It inevitably shapes the narrative we give to our lives and how we understand and perceive our own world. LaBarge’s critiques build on each other in this stream-of-consciousness narrative style, and alongside her, we try to decipher meaning from all that we see and have experienced.
Ultimately, this memoir is not a trauma narrative. It is instead about how impossible it is to form an authentic narrative around a traumatic event. It is a narrative informed by how we build and shape our lives into a narrative. About how we write about our own lives. And about how we find meaning within our own stories and within ourselves.
About Emily LaBarge:
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.
