Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days is a memoir, yes, though one could more aptly describe it as a memoir exploded. Recounting the aftermath of surviving an hours-long hostage situation while on vacation with her family in 2009, LaBarge collages together fragments from a vast archive of films and literary texts about the fallibility of memory and narrative form, laying bare the laborious, at times agonizing process of spinning one’s trauma into language. As such, LaBarge’s debut resists the kind of scriptotherapeutic writing that attempts to lead its author towards catharsis, or something akin to closure. What LaBarge offers instead is a strikingly polyphonic scattering of traumatic, fragmented experiences, both psychological and physical, which amplify the reiterative specter of trauma, a nebulous force that is as all-consuming as it can be peripheral, expanding and retracting itself stubbornly across time.
If memoir imposes a kind of a confessional imperative onto its author, wherein the author feels a pressure to construct what LaBarge calls “the good story,” or the perfect, dazzling articulation of a memoir’s central event, Dog Days works to show the utter impossibility of this goal. Across various passages, LaBarge brushes up against the limits of language, watching words dissipate in the face of her trauma that “twists everything, especially time…” The articulation of what LaBarge refers to as “The Event” thus becomes a futile exercise in “pushing words around. Pushing words against each other.” The words of others, then, offers LaBarge temporary reprieve from the dull friction her own words create.
Take, for example, LaBarge’s fixation on an utterance made by Sylvia Plath to Ted Hughes: “I keep getting picked up by God” The phrase gestures at epiphany and ecstasy and is read by LaBarge as a moment of multiplicity where “something radiant comes into you, I say. It is when you see the world as it is. When everything lines up. When the inside of things glitter. When you can see the veins shining.” However, when trying to explain Plath’s phrase to her husband, LaBarge restructures her definition so that it becomes tangible for a different audience, settling on “when you figure out the structure of an essay, a book, a song, a film, whatever, when all pieces fall into place and they just fit and you can tell and you’re ready to start.” LaBarge’s reconstruction of “I keep getting picked up by God” for someone that can’t immediately access the logic her brain makes of the phrase is an apt metaphor for Dog Days in its entirety. The book is not at all interested in constructing a play-by-play of LaBarge’s family being held hostage by a group of six men. Rather, in trying, and failing, to turn the memory of The Event into a tangible thing to make sense of, LaBarge redirects, with elegance and precision, our attention to the shapelessness of memory itself, refusing to make clean the gaps and holes that rest alongside brief flashes of coherence.
To illustrate the simultaneous ephemerality and elasticity of memory, LaBarge places jarringly poetic interruptions—both in form and in content—amidst sections of straightforward prose writing. These poetic breaks arrive in the form of long, repetitious stanzas, as well as erasures, featuring the names of figures or actions performed as redacted Xs. The effect of these formally disruptive interludes, in addition to amplifying the book’s non-linear approach to life writing, is unsettling in the way that suddenly misremembering a crucial detail in a story one has told a number of times is unsettling. Furthermore, the syntax of the poetic line is often broken grammatically, lending the stanzas a suddenly manic voice that fits uncomfortably next to the prosaic passages that follow. Of course, the tonal shifts in voice here read as intentional, as yet another one of LaBarge’s attempts to wrestle The Event and its aftermath onto the page, no matter the shape it ends up taking.
For those seeking a temporally lucid narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end, Dog Days is best to be avoided. But for those interested in captivating genre deconstructions, and comfortable with visceral accounts of violence and narrative loose ends, Dog Days is a pleasurably disorienting document of survival, one that turns the blurred lens of memory and trauma back on the reader so that they too must question where their story ends, and begins, and ends again, again, again.
NONFICTION
Dog Days
By Emily LaBarge
Transit Books
Published May 19, 2026
