On the night of Dec. 22, 2009, six masked men broke into the holiday rental on a Caribbean island where Emily LaBarge, then 25, was staying with her mother, father and sister. Soon LaBarge felt a crocheted blanket being pulled over her head and a gun pressed to the base of her skull. “We don’t want to hurt you,” the intruders whispered, “but we will.” Eight terrifying hours later, the men left.
Her mother’s friend called it an “amazing story,” hinting that LaBarge should write about it. LaBarge was incredulous: “I remember thinking that’s crazy. No way will I ever write this story.”
She still hasn’t written “this story,” or not exactly. Instead she has written “Dog Days,” a strange and stunning book that begins with the event that would later go by many names — The Incident, That Christmas, The Home Invasion, That Awful Thing That Happened, It.
LaBarge, an essayist and art critic, is alert to the lie of “the good story,” the version that “doesn’t make anyone feel too uncomfortable, bad, complicit.” One especially popular variant is which flattens characters to a reductive back story — an entire life explained by a horrific event. LaBarge is wary of such shortcuts. To call what happened “The Trauma” would be perversely euphemistic, she says, “since it implies something singular and enclosed, when the reality is precisely opposite, no matter how you try to contain it.”
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