Dog Days

A NEW YORK TIMES AND LIT HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • A JUNE ABA INDIE NEXT PICK

In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and “Agnus Dei” played on repeat.

In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, “just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out”—otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find “the good story”: neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?

A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory—drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It’s a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm—Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.