Dog Days

During the Christmas break of 2009, while on holiday with her family, Emily LaBarge was held hostage. It was a freak and harrowing occurrence which sent a series of emotional, intellectual and psychological ripples through the years that followed. In Dog Days, LaBarge attempts to confront form, voice, structure, genre and expectation to think through how a person can make sense of a rupture in their life: when something bad happens, how do you make it cohere? How do you sew it up into a good story? Picking apart conventional trauma narratives though her engagement with artists and writers from David Lynch to Sylvia Plath, from Philip Glass to Bernadette Mayer, Dog Days tests how capacious an essay might be. It is a book about finding a way to write what happened which preserves the truth of its incompleteness, its refusal of useful meaning.