Emily LaBarge

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 at gunpoint 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”: the version that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable, the short-enough one, the one with a moral or punchline. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?

An electrifying synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory that draws upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It’s a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Alice Munro, Dog Days channels form into political inquiry: interrogating how language and institutional structures constrain and distort our understandings of trauma, violence, and care. The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement that move beyond our desire for narrative containment, into a place where writing becomes a way of surviving.