A strange and stunning book ... Expansive ... Braiding memoir with criticism, psychoanalysis with poetry, fiction and even quantum physics. It’s a testament to LaBarge’s gifts as a writer that she can make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive.
In a restless and kaleidoscopic collage of life writing, art criticism, and psychoanalytic and affect theory, Dog Days is LaBarge’s reckoning with (or attempt to expel) this It, the 'incandescent voltage' of trauma ... Offers little in the way of edification or tidy resolution ... A more conventional tale of violence or suffering or addiction might seduce its reader with the utopian promise of repair ... A peculiar, energizing archaeology of violence throughout and is at its most revolutionary when digging into the relational pleasures and griefs of confessional writing.
Embracing disorientation as a formal strategy, Dog Days locates a sympathy between traumatic experience and the practice of writing itself ... At times painfully attuned to this conundrum: that the good story lies behind all stories and may at any moment rear its head. Even as the book draws to a close, there is a sense that it is still undecided on how the good story should be told, if at all ... Stays with the difficulty, veering between ebullience, bewilderment and despair, dogged by its questions about how to make a life in the aftermath, and how to weather being shaped by forces beyond one’s control.
In Dog Days, LaBarge proves herself seriously adept at interpreting and synthesising these inputs in intricate and fascinating ways ... Relentlessly questions its own methods, and ultimately seeks to incorporate its flaws. This doesn’t prevent them from being flaws ... 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.
This book has high, philosophical ambitions, and builds an inquiry into narrative itself ... An expansive, constellatory reading experience ... Dog Days is more than a book of answers, and thank God; it is a book of problems.
A vivid, incandescent miasma ... Dog Days undoubtedly orbits around trauma, though it seems to bristle self-consciously against this fact. Throughout the book, LaBarge rails against testimonies that unwittingly or opportunistically add to ‘the world of Trauma Stories' ... LaBarge downplays her ability to fathom and communicate her experience by deferring to the voices of other writers, thinkers and researchers, allowing her book to unravel – to be ‘protean, malformed – open to irresolution’ – lest her readers perceive her as either a teacher or unreliable witness, instead opting for the ambiguity of remaining the perpetual student of trauma.
A memoir, yes, though one could more aptly describe it as a memoir exploded ... Resists the kind of scriptotherapeutic writing that attempts to lead its author towards catharsis, or something akin to closure. What LaBarge offers instead is a strikingly polyphonic scattering of traumatic, fragmented experiences, both psychological and physical ... For those seeking a temporally lucid narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end, Dog Days is best to be avoided ... A pleasurably disorienting document of survival.
LaBarge and her family were victims of a home invasion ... Dog Days is a roving, erudite text that follows LaBarge as she tries to confront, make sense of, and craft narrative meaning of the experience ... Structurally and syntactically, the book bears close resemblance to one of Carson’s essays or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets ... LaBarge’s analyses are so clean and compelling that she is almost over my shoulder, directing my attention here and then there ... Dog Days doesn’t come to definitive conclusions about trauma or its narrative shape, nor does LaBarge ever suggest there will be any, even just for herself. But by the end, one feels they know something of LaBarge, her life, her taste, her brilliance.
Dog Days resists the sense of control implied by standard narratives—the polite fantasy of our own omniscience. Instead, LaBarge’s debut memoir turns to the potential of language as it fractures along an act of violence, reorienting us to ourselves and how that self might be more fully expressed ... I cried the first time I read this ... Beyond any climactic arc, there’s the quiet recognition, trailed by disbelief, of having arrived at your own epitaph ... Maybe the most generous aim of Dog Days is its embrace of the impossibility of return. A former innocence eludes us, but Eden defined by its borders, we learn, is a paradise foreclosed. Still, the search for redemption has sent us striving.
LaBarge challenges the idea that writing a ‘trauma narrative’ is an act of healing, portraying it instead as a messy unravelling with her experimental and unique prose ... Dog Days’ disorienting narrative deals with the difficulty of piecing together into a cohesive narrative and how easy it is to overanalyze and shift your story to fit into the widely accepted studies and stories of traumas, large and small ... As a result, Dog Days becomes less of a memoir, instead resembling something between a cultural criticism, an essay and an account of LaBarge’s experience unpacking and writing this book.
The fragmentation of traumatic experience and of the psyche of the trauma survivor (though the term 'survivor' is itself embedded in a false hierarchy) is mirrored in Dog Days’ experimental form. LaBarge frequently interrupts the telling to braid her narrative so tautly with those of others that their language blurs together, quotation marks vanishing, lines of demarcation eroding ... At once a profoundly personal account and an utterly political one in its implications for our many current global crises of human violation.
A singular mix of memoir and criticism ... Poignant textual interpretations combine with rigorous analyses of psychology and philosophy to reveal the unrelenting pull of the past. It’s an evocative quest to find meaning in the inexplicable.
