Narrative Amid Trauma: Emily LaBarge in conversation

Narrative Amid Trauma: Emily LaBarge in conversation

From The Shakespeare and Company Interview by Shakespeare and Company

January 21, 2026 · 52 min

About this episode

Emily LaBarge discusses her book 'Dog Days', exploring the impact of trauma on storytelling and memory.

In this wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful conversation, writer Emily LaBarge speaks with host Adam Biles about Dog Days, her groundbreaking new work of nonfiction. Rooted in the 2009 hostage event she and her family survived while on holiday in the Caribbean, the book explores not the incident itself but the psychic “mark” it left—its shape, depth, and resistance to narrative. Emily discusses the instability of storytelling after trauma, the pressure to produce coherent versions for police, insurers, or therapists, and the unsettling sense that the world itself had changed in the aftermath. She reflects on the limits of therapy, the body’s relationship to memory, and how literature, art, and cinema became “fellow travelers” in her attempt to understand the experience. Adam and Emily also consider genre, experiment, and the essay’s capacity to hold fractured thought. Dog Days emerges as a radical, erudite, and emotionally exacting exploration of what it means to live on after rupture. Buy Dog Days: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/dog-days-13 * Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, The London Review of…

People in this episode

Host: Adam Biles

Guest: Emily LaBarge

Topics covered

  • trauma
  • storytelling
  • nonfiction
  • memory
  • literature
  • psychology

Keywords

  • trauma
  • narrative
  • nonfiction
  • psychic mark
  • literature
  • memory
  • Dog Days

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bookforum, Shakespeare and Company, The New York Times, Granta, The London Review of Books, Artforum, Frieze, The Paris Review

Books & works: Dog Days

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