LaBarge, Emily - Dog Days

The Good Story may be every story you write, but the Good Story is also not your story. During the Christmas break of 2009, while on holiday with her family, Emily LaBarge was held hostage for two days. It was a freak and harrowing occurrence which sent a series of emotional, intellectual and psychological ripples through the years that followed. In Dog Days, LaBarge attempts to confront form, voice, structure, genre and expectation to think through how a person can make sense of a rupture in their life: when something bad happens, how do you make it cohere? How do you sew it up into a good story? Picking apart conventional trauma narratives though her engagement with artists and writers from David Lynch to Sylvia Plath, from Philip Glass to Bernadette Mayer, Dog Days tests how capacious an essay might be. It is a book about finding a way to write what happened which preserves the truth of its incompleteness, its refusal of useful meaning. EMILY LABARGE is a Canadian writer based in London. She has written essays and criticism for Granta, London Review of Books, Bookforum, Frieze, The Paris Review, among other publications. LaBarge has written widely for artist books and monographs. Dog Days is her first book.