In Dog Days, a memoir by art and literary critic Emily LaBarge, trauma is a vivid, incandescent miasma
On the evening of 22 December 2009, when the art and literary critic Emily LaBarge was twenty-five, six armed intruders entered the vacation home she and her family had rented on an island in the Caribbean Sea and held them hostage until early morning. Her memoir Dog Days opens on a description of her lying on the floor, seeing, through a hole in the blanket that’s been put over her head, a stranger’s machete dangling from the side of a couch. Towards the end of the book, LaBarge muses about tracing the constellation Canis Major via the ‘Dog Star’ Sirius, writing, ‘I started with the biggest and brightest star because it was the easiest to identify’. She could just as well be referring to the underlying logic of her book: trauma, here, is a vivid, incandescent miasma. Within the radius of its toxic glow, Dog Days unfolds in what appear to be a series of journal entries, in which LaBarge logs and comments on the literature, films, psychiatric studies and philosophical texts she consumes obsessively after the home invasion, attempting to come to terms with the extraordinary terror she experienced by way of the cultural forms most available and familiar to her.
Starting from the site of trauma, LaBarge and the reader attempt, together, to connect the dots on a host of related symptoms like insomnia, magical thinking and altered family dynamics, linking these to excerpts from fiction – short stories by Alice Munro, Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore – and descriptions of films. Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), which deals with the 1982 massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians in Beirut by the Lebanese Forces with support from the IDF, and Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), both make appearances.
It’s a task that culminates in a kaleidoscopic spiral instead of a clear picture, the most convincing moments of which come when LaBarge is describing the ‘parodic’ and irredeemable details of the invasion – ‘chocolate cake smeared on the walls’, ‘a roasted chicken wrapped in an undershirt’ in the bushes, one of the captors sitting down to watch Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) on the television mid-rampage – and when she writes about her dreams involving necromancy, cannibalism and transfiguration. Though it makes sense, given that the hostage-takers are never caught, that LaBarge should likewise deny readers a sense of closure and catharsis, one could argue that without the ‘dog star’ that is the retelling of the traumatic event, LaBarge’s intuitively compiled ruminations would not cohere to form a constellation of ideas at all.
Dog Days undoubtedly orbits around trauma, though it seems to bristle self-consciously against this fact. Throughout the book, LaBarge rails against testimonies that unwittingly or opportunistically add to ‘the world of Trauma Stories… demanded and peddled and normalised in so many spheres of contemporary culture’. She implies that she is unlike the ‘perfect victim’ who sticks to what’s called the ‘good story’, a socially acceptable narrative of events distilled for insurance companies and fair-weather friends. The depth and breadth of her independently motivated research seems to be what is meant to set her story apart from the others. At the same time, LaBarge seems concerned with preemptively countering accusations akin to what literary critic Parul Sehgal wrote in ‘The Case Against the Trauma Plot’, a viral 2021 New Yorker article published on the heels of #MeToo and the COVID-19 pandemic. In that article, Sehgal argued that the ‘enshrinement of testimony in all its guises’ – including in contemporary memoirs – ‘elevated trauma from a sign of moral defect to a source of moral authority, even a kind of expertise’. LaBarge downplays her ability to fathom and communicate her experience by deferring to the voices of other writers, thinkers and researchers, allowing her book to unravel – to be ‘protean, malformed – open to irresolution’ – lest her readers perceive her as either a teacher or unreliable witness, instead opting for the ambiguity of remaining the perpetual student of trauma.
Dog Days by Emily LaBarge. Peninsula Press, £12.99 (softcover)
From the October 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
