EMILY LABARGE’S DOG DAYS IS A MEMOIR, OF SORTS, about the author and her family surviving an armed home invasion in 2009, and her writerly bid, having survived, to translate unutterable events into language. The book opens not on its precipitating scene of violence but with a planned reenactment of the traumatized body’s physical positioning during the violence. “The” traumatized body, I write automatically, which is decidedly nonidentical to LaBarge’s or Emily’s or the author’s or, simply, “her”body. Certain shattering experiences evacuate or obliterate personhood, sever the mind or (if you believe in it) the soul from its material container, removing subjectivity from the conventional terms we conjure for it. That is, in the sucking wormhole of trauma, you are not a you any longer, but a thing, or perhaps a nothing, meat sack, hollow doll.
The family’s osteopath, Pierre, instructs LaBarge 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 of [you], otherwise it will never leave.” For Pierre this It is “merely” pain, but like any traumatized person, LaBarge knows better: It is the virus violence infects you with, the “sticky, tar-like” contaminant left behind, the demon now at the wheel of your life. “I know the bottom,” writes Sylvia Plath in “Elm,” a poem LaBarge will later summon, “I know it with my great tap root: / It is what you fear.” LaBarge pictures her body on that night, in its various configurations, lying first on its front, then the left, and after, on the right side, curled in the fetal position. “It is possible,” she concedes, “that my body did other things during the time that it was lying on the ground, but I cannot remember.”
The body in trauma, yes, is rendered a kind of stranger to the remembering-I, who is also, by the time of Dog Days’sassembly, the authorial-I. LaBarge admits that she never acted on Pierre’s advice, only imagined it, like an exorcism: she had a sense that duplicating those chalk-outline-ish forms might “suck [her] back in” to the place of annihilation, for the body, in the aftermath of such disturbance, becomes “a traitor, a deep hole to somewhere else, not mine.” Noli me tangere,LaBarge laments, remembering the book of John and what Jesus says to Mary Magdalene in the garden after his Resurrection: do not touch me, do not cling to me, because, in LaBarge’s reading, “I am no longer human: I am changed.” In this portal that is the defiled body,time collapses, stretches, glitches, and repeats. LaBarge will go on to explore traumatic temporality through theories like Presentism and Eternalism, wondering whether every moment dissolves as if into nothing with its passing or if each passing instant is always here, always as proximate and impactful as every other. Has the violence been swallowed up into nonexistence or am I inside it, gasping for air, even now?
This terror of time is familiar to me. When trying to crawl out from the post-traumatic sludge of my rapes, I became entranced by string theory and quantum physics, byzantine, gibberishy visions of the universe as infinitely multiple and unimaginably coextensive. On occasion I dreamed of a me somewhere to whom these things hadn’t happened, but many mornings I woke wondering if I had, in fact, died in those rooms, and if in these other universes I no longer existed, had been buried and was mainly forgotten. I wondered if, in this, our own uncanny timeline, I’d been cursed—consigned to something like purgatory or zombification, a response evidently quite common to those who survive profound violence. Traumatized people, LaBarge writes, “feel cast out of the recognizable world,” and (citing trauma scholar Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery) sense that “they belong more to the dead than the living.” For some, this belief intensifies into a calcified delusion, known as Cotard’s syndrome, that they actually are dead and rotting from the inside. When a friend tells her her partying is going to kill her, LaBarge replies, before correcting herself, “But I already died . . . almost, I mean, almost.”
Dissociative recalibrations are fundamentally survivalist in slant: for example, LaBarge’s liturgy goes something like, “I am not me . . . or this is not happening . . . or I can’t die if I’m already dead.” In the psychic thick of trauma, dissociation serves as a tactical procedure of endurance, that subterranean hum: live through this. Later, in the world again of ordinary time, such thought patterns assume the appearance of illogic, as in, if I walk past that bar again, the men will be there, having waited eleven long years to kill me,or if I lie on my hip in this position, I will be transported back to the night I was held hostage. In any case, LaBarge sidesteps the potentially therapeutic repetition. “I now regret this,” she writes, “perhaps It is stuck inside forever.” In a restless and kaleidoscopic collage of life writing, art criticism, and psychoanalytic and affect theory, Dog Days is LaBarge’s reckoning with (or attempt to expel) this It, the “incandescent voltage” of trauma. If annihilative violence tears the subject apart from narrative and experiential coherency, it is also, LaBarge acknowledges, a blast radius of information, strange data attending to the dissolutions and undoings of time, personhood, sensory self-reflexivity, and so on. Some among us—we, the abject—find ourselves compelled to the laborious reassembly of these fragments. In a meta-narratological fashion, Dog Days shows how. Though Dog Days is officially LaBarge’s debut, she’s well-established and respected as a critic, mainly of visual art, and works as a professor in the writing program at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work first came to my attention in her 2019 Bookforum review of Japanese novelist Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, which chronicles, according to LaBarge, “a woman who is in the process of reconstituting herself in the face of an absence.” This transubstantiative principle feels emblematic: her meditations on a certain kind of female maker—Tsushima, Ana Mendieta, Francesca Woodman, Chantal Akerman, Julia Margaret Cameron—seemed to me to be building a canon of women who know the bottom, women for whom physical, aesthetic, and ontological lacunae animate revolutionary projects of self-making. How does the body register as an outline? How might a woman go up like smoke?
Recently I wept over a selection of Mendieta’s siluetas at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood. It’s difficult to witness Mendieta’s fascination with her own effacement in light of her death, at thirty-six, after falling from the thirty-fourth-floor window of her husband Carl Andre’s Greenwich Village apartment (she “went out the window,” said Andre, who was acquitted of murder and continued to live in said apartment until his own death in 2024). Violent ends connect several among LaBarge’s pantheon, many of whom surface in the intensely intertextual matrix of Dog Days: Mendieta killed; Woodman, Plath, and Anne Sexton all famous suicides. Tsushima’s father—Osamu Dazai, also a novelist—drowned himself in the Tamagawa Aqueduct with the woman he’d left his family for.
“Can an image be carved into the air?” LaBarge wonders in The Paris Review, writing about Mendieta’s earth-body sculptures, in which the artist imprinted her body or its outline in landscapes or other “natural” materials. Mendieta also appears, unnamed or, like air, unnameable, in a list of horrible things that saturate LaBarge’s ravaged mind on the other side of violence. She cannot stop thinking, for example, of “the steamed greens from the Chinese takeaway dinner still in [Mendieta’s] stomach after her body was flattened on the tarmac roof.” In a series of self-portraits I studied in the gallery, Mendieta—with her back to the camera, her face turned from the spectator—tugs hands covered in red paint further and further down a wall until nothing but the paint streaks are visible, until her body sinks below the photograph’s visual field. In the rubble of her own trauma, LaBarge has a sense of her family remaining in a world no longer theirs, or “maybe we were supposed to be gone—maybe we were supposed to be nowhere at all.”
This is all a rather circuitous fashion of approaching the so-called good story of Dog Days,which is to say its inciting incident, the night, some sixteen years ago now, of LaBarge and her family’s captivity. In a review of the memoir for Frieze, Daisy Lafarge writes that the traumatic event is thought by the cynic to be “the writer’s dream . . . Good stories—the more horrifying the better—are high currency” in contemporary publishing. Certainly, in the era of the personal essay vertical, prurient interest could make or break a book deal, but that form’s heyday was over a decade ago, and what Lafarge recognizes in Dog Days and what LaBarge demonstrates here is a profound disinterest in satiating the “peanut-crunching crowd” of gossipmongers and true crime cultists. She circles and redirects and digresses and fragments; she beckons the story of that night with memory-jogging sequences that mimic Joe Brainard’s I Remember or the bureaucratic tedium that went into compiling a Schedule of Loss—a legal document meant to itemize what has been taken or destroyed, and what may hopefully be recovered—for authorities in the wake of the crime. In other sections, she holds the horror of that night determinedly at bay: an entire recounting of the chronology reads something like this:
Someone is yelling . . . Someone is holding a gun to someone’s head . . . Someone smash smash . . . Someone laughing someone haha ha ha ha what is funny . . . Someone XXXXXX someone XX. Someone say rape you someone say stab you someone say shoot you someone say . . . TK, XXX, X, XXXXXX, something missing, yet unwritable or unwritten, there is a difference … Someone The End.
And yet. The logistical unfolding of a traumatic event may be mostly simple: what, where, who, when, and (here things get stickier) why. In a rented home on an unnamed island at Christmastime 2009, LaBarge and her family were held hostage for several hours by six men armed with machetes, guns, a screwdriver. We know what led the family to this moment—a vacation—and the atmosphere in the house at the time becomes sketched in. They had been watching the 1993 pseudo-cross-dressing custodial-rights comedy Mrs. Doubtfire when it happened, and suddenly “a flash and movement in the corner of [LaBarge’s] vision.” The men are there. Then facts go all foggy: “I did not hear them coming. Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.” The movie runs to its conclusion, The End, cue looping DVD menu. Then one of the men puts on a compilation of religious songs meant to “soothe the soul”—songs, LaBarge writes, that are actually “imploring cries of anguish” concerning absolution and mercy, and which have been put on to drown the noise of the family’s “XX.”
Some 186 pages later, LaBarge describes the layout of the house, with its “sliding glass doors that opened completely so the big room was filled with fresh air,” followed by an eerier memory, of touring the place and being told that “we didn’t need to close [the doors] at night for safety.” Afterward, the house is not a house but a crime scene, though “violence has not endowed the house with any spectacular or unusual qualities. It is exactly the same as before, just ruined”—like the body, like the self. Years later, in London, LaBarge hires a private investigator to track down one of the assailants and realizes she can’t locate the property any longer. “I spend so much time looking that I begin to think,” she writes, “that I imagined it, that there is no good story at all.” Some 190 pages after the men’s entrance, LaBarge cites sleep and memory researcher Robert Stickgold’s sense that PTSD is most dramatically characterized by “failed memory processing,” and Herman’s observation that “in states of high sympathetic nervous system arousal, the linguistic encoding of memory is inactivated.”
Facing trauma, the experiential self is split from temporality and language; the brain’s capacity for narrative, in effect, short-circuits. If the “good story” is meant to be a writer’s dream, it appears at the expense of the usual workings of the writerly brain. Trauma is a narrative problem that LaBarge returns to throughout the book. It finds novel methods of frustrating her each time: “there is no story”; “there’s the blank page”; she must “remake the book”; “it is polyvocal, includes everyone you know and many whom you don’t”; and “traffics first and foremost in uncertainty.” The plot may benefit from its ability to intervene in the flooded attention economy, but a writer’s capacity to transform it into art has been kneecapped from the jump. The trauma memoir, an increasingly contested form in the past half decade, thus surfaces from the muck of an ontological contradiction: memoir demands its writing-I, asks for the sake of its reader that the narrative be captained by a self able to be—or pretending to be—both self-present and intellectually and aesthetically self-reflexive. And yet the trauma is in no small part fracturing precisely because of the way it disaggregates any coherent experience of personhood. The “I” just falls to pieces.
Dog Days offers little in the way of edification or tidy resolution: “If there is a lesson, an ending happy or sad, gruesome or funny, I don’t know what it is and I’m not sure I care.” A more conventional tale of violence or suffering or addiction might seduce its reader with the utopian promise of repair. In such a way, the (orthodox) trauma plot rather mirrors the marriage plot: with each, social inequity or disorder becomes mended through a reassimilation or rehabilitation of its asymmetrically positioned protagonist. The unmarried woman is absorbed into the quotidian world of the marital dyad, while the violated heroine is transmogrified by her “healing” “journey.” Both are morally ennobled in the process. Perhaps this is part of what so enraged literary critics about Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life: the hero endures violence after violence only to be granted nothing resembling absolution or mercy in the end. He is not transformed by torment, only made more pitiable. There is, in Jude’s life, no guarantee but pain and death, a reality many people—living, nonfictional people—must face each day.
To sidestep the presumption that all experience affords an opportunity for knowledge production is a radical move, flying in the face of both post-Enlightenment philosophies of liberation and progress and a surging late-capitalist entreaty toward lone-wolf-style self-optimization. No grief or joy may flee its use value as an extractable resource: you must work as hard as you play (which is, apparently, also “hard”), unearth an anecdote or therapeutic lesson from the awful breakup, rise from your dehumanization like a phoenix. But recent additions to the canon of trauma memoirs often circumvent such mandates of hope, mediating trauma’s resistance to being managed like a closed circuit through formal, as well as narrative, experimentalism. Think Carmen Maria Machado’s genre-hopping excavation of domestic violence in In the Dream House, Neige Sinno’s literary critical approach to childhood sexual abuse in Sad Tiger (a cerebral, restless book that has a great deal in common with Dog Days), or Édouard Louis’s layered retelling of rape in History of Violence. These are not books especially interested in explanatory scaffoldings. Character and chronology are not affixed or illuminated by the fracturing experience; indeed, the event seems to explode every recognizable storytelling category. Trauma does not render these authors authoritative, either morally or aesthetically—it unmoors the narrating subject from their position on the horizon of utterability.
LaBarge probes the why of trauma—I told you this part was stickier—as a twofold inquiry. The first she dismisses basically outright: the traumatized subject’s why me is a functionally unanswerable lament, and one that principally ferments into the stink of shame, a quest by the survivor to shoulder evil’s heft so as to explain it, to grant it order. Rape culture, for example, secures its own self-perpetuation in no small part through redirecting the why of sexual violence into a litany of doubts lodged not against the perpetrator but the victim: was your skirt short, do you fuck a lot, had you left your drink unattended, did you seem that night like you wanted It. Mechanisms of control during acts of violence, LaBarge insists, are not especially complex, but “designed first and foremost to show contempt for a person’s autonomy and dignity, to violate bodily integrity, and to provide witness to this indignity and helplessness.” Part of getting over It is making peace with the non-exceptionalism of violation. You are not, generally speaking, a singular object in the eyes of your assailant, which is also—here, the relief—to say that you are not to blame. You are not a you, remember: the horror of this recognition, and the unburdening. The house isn’t any different, LaBarge reminds us over and over again. Just ruined.
The second is why tell: the memoirist, writes LaBarge, longs for a “Faustian bargain with the page, which promises meaning if life . . . is adequately harvested for experience.” But what is to be done when the experience at hand holds “no answer to be furnished”? Must we see, then, the desire to assemble narrative as rising from a more primordial place—is it compulsion, purgation, some ineluctable tic of the human’s beholdenness to language? Can we just not help ourselves? There is an ache, in the mourner making that devil’s deal, for the story to become talismanic, a throbbing hope we might invest the narrative with—and so travel beyond the grip of—our vilest histories. If there is no sense of meaning or futurity in the aftermath of trauma, “how to live in a world in which at all points I am keenly aware that What Happened can happen, at any time, to me, to anybody.” But the telling of a thing does not and cannot wipe out the thing itself. Giving an account of my rapes in a book did not unrape me, nor can the tale protect me from further aftershocks or immunize me against additional violence. The world may bend at the shock of words, but it does not break; it is the world, after all, and we are but temporary interruptions. This is not to envision the order of things as immovable, but to say meaningful metamorphosis requires more than the individual sense of it.
Dog Days is a peculiar, energizing archaeology of violence throughout and is at its most revolutionary when digging into the relational pleasures and griefs of confessional writing. A writer, of course, needs her reader, and for LaBarge the dyadic dynamic that surfaces in this storytelling encounter operates in a knottily affective economy. Overreliances, hyperextensions, and all manner of debts accumulate here. The survivor of trauma—particularly the person whose suffering entails techniques of extreme dehumanization—must reckon with an existential theft, the certain knowledge that a different life and style of self “vaguely promised” has been irrevocably stolen. But to offload such a story onto the listener is to make an ethical demand, the demand of witness. In an incendiary essay on Plath that turned me off her for years, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote of the scorched-earth apocalyptica of Plath’s late period, and its indifference, in Plath’s anguish, to the anguish of others: “She is capable of anything—that we know . . . [and] does not ask the cost.”
Citing Hardwick, LaBarge writes that she has “wondered for years about that cost, what it might be and to whom it is owed.” Does grief’s story owe the survivor healing? Does the reader owe her sympathy? Does the memoirist of trauma, by turn, owe her reader the cleanliness of a narrative arc or else the integrity of transparency concerning abjection’s chaos? If your audience demands detail you don’t wish to divulge, must you become Lady Lazarus, allowing readers to “unwrap [you] hand and foot— / The big strip tease.” There is the fear, too, of contagion: “I don’t want to give it to anyone,” LaBarge insists. I remember this feeling, like I was sick with something that was catching, like I wandered through the world in a haze of shame and filth. This is the Medusa glare of trauma: LaBarge recalls people “talking to [her] like [she] was made of glass, but also like [she] was something bad—something you shouldn’t look straight at.” Funny how infrequently people remember that Medusa was made villainous because of her victimization—transformed by Athena into a monster after being raped in the goddess’s temple.
The “good story,” LaBarge remarks, may be tidied or left messy but nonetheless “exceeds the sum of its parts.” It is only ever partial, a continually shifting and accumulating history that is frequently and necessarily opaque to the subject who has lived it. For the individual, trauma is experienced as utterly singular, but—Dog Days reminds us—the tale we tell ourselves and others of it should not perpetuate our isolation. LaBarge mobilizes Judith Butler’s Precarious Life on the matter of radical intersubjectivities, but I prefer the Butler of Giving an Account of Oneself, where they write, following Levinas, of the ineradicable porousness of being human: “That we are impinged upon primarily and against our will is the sign of a vulnerability and a beholdenness that we cannot will away.” Rather than meeting this fact only in its capacity to terrorize, Butler suggests it is precisely the quagmire from which the ethical dimension of social life surfaces. We all are subject to sorrow, love, violence, joy, and death; the attempt to make intelligible the particularities of our experiences of these conditions is what solidifies and enlivens our relation to a shared world. It is what we recognize in others, and what renders us recognizable to them. The “biggest choice of all,” LaBarge writes, is “to not be singular, individual, alone.” And she isn’t.
Jamie Hood is the author of Trauma Plot: A Life (Pantheon, 2025).