Dog Days unfolds in a long shadow of strange violence - where language stutters, time loops turn, and the body remembers what the mind cannot.
An inspiring book, a milestone in how to harness language to express the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, precise, and utterly authentic.
In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were taken hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed on her head while the songs from "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Agnes Dey" played repeatedly.In later years, her therapist encouraged her to lie in exactly the same position, “as it happened, for the same amount of time, for as long as it takes for the pain to go away” — otherwise it would never go away. She tried to find the “good story”: elegant, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things that a good story leaves out?Dog Days is a high-energy synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory—drawing on films and writing from Mulholland Drive to It's a Wonderful Life, from Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm—that addresses this question.How do language and institutions constrain and even distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How can we write differently, telling a story and its implications on our own terms? The result is not just a work of prose, but a practice as well: an insistence on more radical and complex forms of interaction, and a search for the place where writing becomes a means of survival.
