‘I remember everything,’ Emily LaBarge writes early on in Dog Days, her coruscating debut that is as much about writing as it is about trauma, grief, and the talismans of catharsis. ‘I live by this memory,’ she continues, ‘it forms such a core of my person, what I am able to write, what catches my attention, until all of a sudden there are some things I can’t remember at all.’

What happens when our memory of a certain event, ‘on the twenty-second day of December, 2009, at two of the o’clock, Eastern Standard Time’, ‘on a low-lying coral island in the Atlantic Ocean’, is punctured not by details, but by absences? How do our own stories slip through our fingers to coalesce — both intentionally and less so — with the narratives of others? What does it mean to be Touched with a capital T, to be changed, marked by a horrifying ordeal that leaves everything irrevocably Euphemised: The Thing, The Home Invasion, It, The Trauma, The Incident, What Happened?

Dog Days begins with a searing account of when LaBarge and her family were held hostage in a rented holiday home by six masked men bearing guns, knives, and machetes. It revisits an unspeakable invasion, one that rends the fabric of her then-25-year-old life, staining it with the sense of having travelled beyond the pale and re-entered the world no longer quite whole.

‘We survive, we do,’ she writes, ‘but The End comes again and again, comes at surprising times, unbidden and with great force, summoned by images, asides, happenstance, like an errant punctuation mark.’ The End becomes a point of departure, a renewal of life’s lease into the tricky business of living again, kaleidoscopically, ‘in multiple directions at once’.

Many things recur, mantra-like: sentences, images, quotes from different authors that after a while thread themselves so seamlessly into LaBarge’s own telling that the distinction between where she ends and another writer begins starts to blur. But a phrase that trips over itself in my mind again and again is from the first recounting of the immediate hours after The Incident: ‘What time is it, time is over, The End.’ And: ‘They did not come from that way I want to say but actually who cares, I can’t feel anything, The End.’ LaBarge is an exquisite writer. In a book of otherwise painstakingly sculpted sentences, these stand jaggedly apart — shards of glass on a house’s outer wall; violent strangers who are not supposed to be there. 

In the wake of a traumatic event, language — the writer’s strongest tool — flails and falters. ‘I have said that I do not believe there is anything language cannot do,’ she writes, ‘but that does not mean language, and with it form, comes naturally. It means only that it must be reconsidered and unlearned at each turn.’ The ensuing book, which itself resists an easy form, is an account of this unravelling, the loosening and unbraiding of words and meaning in order to coil them into new coherence.

Dog Days is a memoir, studded with personal affinities for a formidable and eclectic array of works of art, film, and literature. It is also a critique of narrativising pain, encapsulating the essay form’s historical business of assaying towards something, of ‘a type of writing so hard,’ as Brian Dillon has written, ‘its very name means a trial, effort or attempt. An ancient form with an eye on the future, a genre poised between tradition and experiment’.

Most of LaBarge’s touchstones are canonical because of their experimental nature. ‘I did not hear them coming,’ she says. ‘Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.’ Her frustration at this lapse in memory singe these sentences. Both halting and emphatic, they ring with echoes of Beckett’s The Unnamable: ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ A moment from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse reappears like an incantation, repeated with the rhythmic precision of palming prayer beads:

[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along the passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]

It is parenthetical, a narrative aside to the novel’s already plotless plot, Woolf’s glinting, moon-bright middle finger to action and a paean, instead, to the recesses of feeling. LaBarge is haunted by this sentence, she professes, by how it ‘stumbles and tries to recover, to carry on making sense as usual’. Her syntactical analysis is a reflection of her own project: to attempt to narrate the unspeakable, recount what the body and mind have deliberately erased in order to continue heaving itself on, be understood without having to temper one’s explanation.

‘We do not need the second he stretched his arms out, we could proceed directly to they remained empty, the outcome of what but introduces,’ she writes. ‘But here it is, repeated, as if loss has passed through the sentence and erased its former structure and content.’ Things fall apart and their fragments cannot reasonably be put back together, she observes later on. The reiteration of he stretched his arm out is the ‘stutter of language, like life, marked by grief — senseless, maybe unbelieving’. She tries this on, like a glove left behind by someone with similar-sized hands, to describe her own situation: ‘She sits down at her desk to write, but, she sits down at her desk to write.’

Yet love also exists in these hollows. While ridden with the loneliness of durational trauma, Dog Days is a book that nevertheless positions grief as a communal project. It brims with references, to things read — and clearly reread, again and again — and watched, apprehended and listened to, but also to words uttered by kith and kin. Among her closest primary sources are her friends, her husband, and her family, whose glimmers of insight magnify and add texture to her own.

Thinking about Sylvia Plath’s repeated utterance in her final weeks (‘I keep getting picked up by God’), LaBarge transcribes an echo of this conversation with her husband about madness. She speculates that getting picked up by God is ‘something radiant that comes into you’, ‘when you see the world as it is’, ‘the veins shining’, the ‘insides of things’ glittering; ‘when you know what no one else does’. ‘It is like when you figure out the structures of an essay,’ she notes, ‘. . . when all the pieces fall into place and they just fit and you can tell and you’re ready to start.’

Starting, for LaBarge, involves picking apart the threads of what she terms The Good Story: ‘the short version that doesn’t make anyone too uncomfortable, bad, complicit’, ‘a socially acceptable’ narrative arc with ‘just enough details to perturb’. Like with her transfiguration of The Schedule of Loss, the legal document for compensation she is tasked with creating soon after The Home Invasion (‘laptop, clothes, jewellery, books, dignity, mind’), she is searching instead for an alternative to this neat narrative, for a story that is ‘incoherent, missing pieces, anti-social, and compulsive’.

In this reconfiguration, LaBarge resists linearity or opacity. It’s hard, even while leafing through her book’s pages, to find a straightforward telling, to find how many hours What Happened happened for, to know exactly when, even exactly where, or how she finds out one of the hostage-takers is now in London. The story convulses at times, flitting between a ‘you’ that is also an ‘I’, as in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, another narrative about using language to articulate a version of events that feels deeper and more true, one that doesn’t exist to soothe the feelings of others. ‘You learn quickly that all anyone wants is the bare bones, no details, please.’

Dog Days is a work that contends with the difficulty of committing words to a page, and letting them stay there. Of writing as elegy, as grief-work, as mourning song. But more than that, writing as catharsis, as reconstruction, as rapture. So many artists and writers are returned to like old friends in this book, but Woolf’s well-paced reappearances perhaps strike most poignantly at the heart of LaBarge’s own project. ‘It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole;’ she quotes from the autobiographical essay, “Sketch of the Past”, ‘this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.’

Dog Days works with these severed parts: through the psychological and spiritual ramifications of a horrific event, through the knowledge that “event”, really, is too neat and finite a word for trauma, through encounters with the creative offerings of others, through narrative and its residual aches and slippages, and most of all, through living to tell the tale.

It is a cluster of stars, of propositions on how to live after some part of you has been irretrievably lost. How to not whine, not complain, to work harder, spend more time alone, as Didion says; to contain the grief and rage, as Carson theorises, to watch other people’s unbearable stories in order to cleanse you of your darkness. How to lasso the moon, as George Bailey says, how to get out of the woods and step into the light, to be undone by your relations, as Judith Butler proposes, and let your narrative falter. How to be, like Plath, the arrow, the house of the muse, or, like Sirius, ‘shining, tremulous, sparkling, scorching, searing, a star that is also a sun’. To go on, because you must, and even if you can’t, you will.

In ‘The Modern Essay’, a text which is not explicitly cited but is, I’d wager, one LaBarge knows well, Woolf notes that the best essays give pleasure ‘not because they are instructive, but because they reveal the mind of the writer’. Dog Days does this in every possible way, charting loss — of memory, of bearings, of self — through an impassioned, intensely vulnerable and no less indomitable lens that is entirely the writer’s own. It is as sincere a work of nonfiction as can be hoped for. It is — despite but also perhaps because of its narrative gaps, which any ordinary person incapable of remembering everything experiences as accurate on a daily basis — dazzlingly, achingly true.

Had What Happened never happened, one gets the sense still that only she could have written something like this, that only she could have transfigured The Schedule of Loss into a constellation of works of art — her own and those of others — worthy of the biggest and brightest star. ‘Sirius flames so hotly in the sky when it rises that it is thought dangerous, sinister, wanton, punitive, malignant,’ LaBarge tells us, late in the book’s hour, ‘so powerful that during its reign from early July to mid-August, the dog days of summer, certain activities are believed unwise: purging, bloodletting, romance, violence, rage.’ Of course, she enacts each and every one of these pursuits in her Dog Days, which is no less wise for it.

The different accounts of the same story slither this way and that; the figures of authority dispense sympathy but keep their secrets; the case is closed, and re-opened, and must be closed again — a closure usually granted, LaBarge yields, by oneself. As a subject of enquiry, trauma is fathomless, incapable of the neat narrative structure of beginning, middle, end. LaBarge could go on and on in this undertaking, could write a book that never ends, that spirals until it eats itself up like a primordial serpent. Instead, she puts Adorno’s theory of the essay into elegant, cathartic practice here, in this work that is both exposed and composed, taut and immense, luminous and frightening, stopping ‘where it feels itself complete — not where nothing is left to say.’ She sits down at her desk to write, but, she sits down at her desk to write.

Julia Merican is a writer living between London and Kuala Lumpur. Her first two books, The Inconsolable Secrets and Plain Things for Lustrous, will be published next year with MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE and Antigone Editions. 

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