Dog Days

A Memoir

By: Emily LaBarge

Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, an electrifying account of living with and writing about trauma from a singular new voice in Canadian literature.

Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident’s aftermath.

Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences—from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch—LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative.

Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving, a book unlike any other and one destined to become an essential text.

Critic reviews

“An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original.”
Olivia Laing

“Emily LaBarge renders trauma as a lived experience, and so Dog Days is not merely a trauma study, of which there are many, but also a unique literary experience. Dog Days is rich in ideas. A fascinating work, unusually conceived and written, disturbing, honest, and profound.”
Lynne Tillman

“Dog Days is a book about the relentless presentness of the past and the philosophical vertigo that follows a harrowing life-altering event. What emerges is a profound and necessary inquiry into how we assemble a self from the fragments of what we’ve read, what we’ve seen, and what we’ve survived.”
Anne Boyer

“Emily LaBarge is always intellectually agile and emotionally capacious.”
Deborah Levy