In 2009, Emily LaBarge’s family travelled from snowy Canada to Turks and Caicos to celebrate Christmas in the tropics. One night, as the family watched Mrs Doubtfire at their rented house, six men armed with guns and machetes broke in and took the family prisoner. The film continued to play, until the man keeping watch over them switched it off and put on a CD instead: choral music performed by the Oxford New College Choir. “The subtitle of the album is ‘music to soothe the soul’,” LaBarge writes, “but it is filled with songs that are actually imploring cries of anguish.” Hours later, having looted the house, the men left.
What a good story, is the thought that naturally occurs. Horrible, terrifying, but – the writer’s brain insists – what material. Yet much of Dog Days, the first book by LaBarge, a Canadian journalist and essayist based in London, is taken up with the difficulty of its subject matter. She describes the gash the ordeal left in her life; she becomes insomniac, believes people are following her, that tree branches are communicating with her, and encounters people from the past who cannot possibly be in London. Some of them have been dead for years. She is told her “unhinged quality” is attractive but is together enough to consider that is “a supremely unattractive thing to say”.
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Alongside this account, LaBarge draws on an array of books, films, paintings and psychological theories to help explore what she’s going through. Her choices might not be surprising – Freud and Jung, Woolf and Nabokov, Plath, Didion, Lynch and the Elizabeths Bishop and Hardwick – but it’s what she does with them that impresses. In Dog Days, LaBarge proves herself seriously adept at interpreting and synthesising these inputs in intricate and fascinating ways.
The attack suffered by the LaBarge family came to be known by many names: “the good story, It, That Awful Thing That Happened, That Christmas, The Incident, What Your Family Went Through, The Thing, The Home Invasion, and sometimes – though rarely, as it seems too explicit, sometimes embarrassing, which victimhood, because it is helpless, often feels – The Trauma.” LaBarge writes self-consciously, fully aware that trauma stories are “narrated and constructed and demanded and peddled and normalised in so many spheres of contemporary culture”.
She describes the gash the ordeal left in her life; she becomes insomniac, believes people are following her, that tree branches are communicating with her
Additionally, “trauma is a narrative problem”, LaBarge writes, because beyond the sheer fact of the event itself “there is no story”. Dog Days thus becomes a battle fought on two fronts: first, what is the story she is trying to tell? And second, can she make the book not only an analysis of what happened to her, but also, in some way, an embodiment of it? The home invasion and its ongoing impacts are fragmented and scattered through the text, receding and then returning in the manner of PTSD. Certain aspects of the experience remain either irretrievable or inexpressible: “She XXXXXXXXXXXXXX. XXX and XXXXX… And XX and XX and XX,” LaBarge writes, using a redaction technique borrowed from Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights. In the final section, this struggle with expression becomes the dominant concern.
The book relentlessly questions its own methods, and ultimately seeks to incorporate its flaws. This doesn’t prevent them from being flaws – a writer’s anxieties about what they’re writing, which we get quite a few pages of, are only ever going to be interesting to the writer – but Dog Days’ stop-start rhythms aren’t evidence of a lack of skill, as numerous virtuosic passages prove. The book’s inability to find the best shape for itself comes from LaBarge’s admirable desire to write from inside her experience, and to give the most accurate account of it she can. Even before the Salt Path scandal, I mistrusted any essayist whose life possessed the neatness of fiction. That LaBarge’s doesn’t is one of the great strengths of her book.
Dog Days by Emily LaBarge is published by Peninsula (£12.99). Order a copy of from The Observer Shop for £11.69. Delivery charges may apply
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Illustration by Sidney Hall