{"id":663,"date":"2026-07-20T12:11:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=663"},"modified":"2026-07-20T12:11:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:11:41","slug":"emily-labarges-life-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=663","title":{"rendered":"Emily LaBarge\u2019s Life Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Over the course of a career, what a critic trains her eye on and the manner and method in which she does so reveals an essential fact about the writer herself. Her recursive references, preoccupations with a milieu, persuasions toward certain themes, and so on can suggest something of her life\u2014her anxieties and desires\u2014without giving much in the way of divulgence. For example: If she tends to write about women artists and writers who worked in the latter half of the 20th century, around the time of feminism\u2019s second wave, then readers can infer a set of inclinations and affiliations. This is to say that criticism is personal, close to the bone, even if it\u2019s written in a distant tone. For some critics, however, anecdotes inflect their work, the autobiographical items necessary to then stage arguments about the object before them. There is, I think, a thin line between the critic who uses her life\u2019s stories to assist in her reading of a novel and the memoirist who uses a novel to give shape to the story of her life.<\/p>\n

Read more Great War: The Climate of June 1914<\/a><\/p>\n

Emily LaBarge is a critic who toes this line in her first book-length project, Dog Days<\/em>. So far in her career, she has written about the work of many female artists and writers born in the last century and associated with various strains of feminism, including Helen Frankenthaler, Rosemary Mayer, Francesca Woodman, Chantal Akerman, Ana Mendieta, Vivian Gornick, Natalia Ginzburg, Susan Howe, and Sandra Lahire. In Dog Days<\/em>, LaBarge expands her critical scope in length and subject, assessing the task of the nonfiction writer. Blending experimental memoir techniques with critical analysis, the result is something that would best be described as metacriticism by way of auto-theory: LaBarge uses her own life and her subjective encounters with art to consider the state of criticism and memoir. Other contemporary practitioners of metacriticism and auto-theory include Maggie Nelson, who in The Argonauts<\/em> surveyed her marriage, sexuality, and pregnancy through readings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, and Olivia Laing, who in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Living Alone<\/em> reckons with her decision to move to Manhattan through encounters with the work of New York artists like Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz. In Dog Days<\/em>, LaBarge briefly references both Nelson\u2019s The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial <\/em>and a book by the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, The Divided Self<\/em>, to which Olivia Laing (no relation) often refers in her work.<\/p>\n

The forebears of this practice include the critics and memoirists Joan Didion and Vivian Gornick, both of whom are included in Dog Days<\/em>\u2019 epigraphs alongside one from Butler. Neither Didion nor Gornick fit into a singular label, be it \u201ccritic\u201d or \u201cmemoirist.\u201d Although transmitted in opposing modes and styles, their work creates a third thing from the admixture of criticism and memoir: the insight into both life and art that only a deeply feeling yet shrewdly intellectual mind can produce. In Dog Days<\/em>, LaBarge circles the mysteries of Didion\u2019s writing more persistently than Gornick\u2019s. However, I would argue that Gornick casts a wider, if more implicit, shadow over Dog Days<\/em>: Gornick\u2019s tireless circling of certain literary passages throughout her life resembles LaBarge\u2019s own dogged persistence throughout the book. In LaBarge\u2019s review of Gornick\u2019s 2021 memoir, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader<\/em>, a sentence from its concluding paragraph reads like a prescient summary of her own book: \u201cWe are all patchwork and collage, haunted for better or worse by our experiences and ideas, and how we have tried to reckon with them\u2014in life and in writing.\u201d LaBarge briefly returns to Unfinished Business <\/em>in her book as a touchstone of \u201cwhat keeps a work of non-fiction alive and meaningful: the risk of self-knowledge, with its Janus faces both appealing and grotesque.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a period of time, LaBarge writes, she suffered from sensory delusions. As she descended underground for the train, she discerned strains of classical music. When she woke up, she heard whispers. In London, where she moved after growing up in Canada, she implausibly spotted a series of figures from her childhood on the streets. \u201cTheir faces melt as soon as I turn to look, they pretend it was not them, here to spy on me, to see what I have become, but I know,\u201d she writes. LaBarge diagnoses this phenomenon as pareidolia, \u201cthe tendency to perceive specific, often meaningful images or patterns in random or amorphous data.\u201d She argues that her uncanny hallucinations\u2014making patterns from delusions and then making meaning from these patterns\u2014resembles the task of the nonfiction writer.<\/p>\n

To prove this, she takes the reader on a vertiginous literary and artistic survey, from obscure studies to seminal texts. In effect, her book constructs a multidisciplinary definition of pareidolia, finding examples in Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s notebooks, Virginia Woolf\u2019s essay \u201cThe Cinema,\u201d Charlotte Perkins Gilman\u2019s story \u201cThe Yellow Wallpaper,\u201d Sigmund Freud\u2019s interpretation of \u201creferential delusions,\u201d Carl Jung\u2019s definition of \u201csynchronicity,\u201d the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein\u2019s definition of the \u201cbizarre object,\u201d the psychologist Leonore Terr\u2019s study of the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping, and Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s story \u201cSigns and Symbols.\u201d This definitional exercise culminates in her reading of Didion\u2019s grief-centered memoirs A Year of Magical Thinking <\/em>and Blue Nights<\/em>. \u201cThere are to be no answers to the sudden death of a husband and, just a year later, a daughter, nor to the many other deaths and losses that course through these two spare memoirs,\u201d LaBarge writes. \u201cWe miss important messages, symbols and signs, signs and symbols, because they can only be recognised later. Because meaning is accrued not bestowed, and this is the work of time and narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a dizzying amount of references, challenging to summarize by virtue of their number and diverging styles and disciplines, traditions and themes. And yet LaBarge spins out from them connections that form the crux of her book\u2019s philosophy:<\/p>\n

\n

The non-fiction writer has a Faustian bargain with the page, which promises meaning if life\u2014sometimes her own\u2014is adequately harvested for experience\u2026. To imagine how disparate things fit together, to produce coincidence, alignment, parallelism, are the goals of the writer, and the essayist in particular. To imply that one thing follows another, to make you believe it because of the way I say or write or show it. Every piece of writing is a wager about how things may or may not hold together, on the page and off.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This section on pareidolia exemplifies Dog Days<\/em>\u2019 conceit: Beginning with LaBarge\u2019s own mental state, it then makes sense of it through literature, art, and psychoanalytic theory, concluding with a broader thesis about the task of representing life in art. In the end, though, I ask myself: Where did all of this critical analysis get her? LaBarge seldom returns to the analysis of herself. And when she does, it is nowhere near the level of the critical attention that she affords to, say, Didion\u2019s work. Once she tells the reader precisely what, in her estimation, a writer should<\/em> aim toward, the work takes on a self-conscious edge. After setting up the reader\u2019s expectations, Dog Days <\/em>can proceed down one of two paths: mimic the formula set by those essayists before her, or break the genre apart.<\/p>\n

So far, it may be unclear that Dog Days <\/em>is a response to a traumatic event in LaBarge\u2019s life. In 2009, during a Christmas holiday, armed robbers held her and her family hostage for nearly seven hours in their vacation home in the Caribbean. But Dog Days<\/em> is not about the robbery, or her life after the robbery. Instead, it is about the pain of recounting this event in her everyday life: each Christmas; on subsequent family holidays; when she learns that one of the robbers lives in London; while newly encountering the misunderstood women in the short stories of Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, and Joy Williams. But, even more so, it is about the struggle to straightforwardly transpose her experience into language.<\/p>\n

Like a Brecht play, LaBarge lays bare the unforgiving, unseen, painful labor involved in writing about a real event in a real life. For her, much of this looks like turning away from herself, or, rather, fractalizing herself so as to embed her subjectivity into the scaffolding of theory, literature, science, and art.<\/p>\n

The robbery is an inexplicable event, and LaBarge struggles to make sense of it. She recalls concrete details: the feeling of the gun pressed to the base of her head, the contorted position of her body, the sounds of the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire<\/em> playing in the background, her father\u2019s hands all tied up, heads smothered in pillowcases, urinating, pinching, screwdrivers, the CD of religious choral music that one of the men chose to play over and over. After the ordeal, she remembers the odd expression on her sister\u2019s face, giving a statement to a woman with acrylic nails who misspells the word yelling<\/em>, officials\u2019 profuse apologies, returning to Canada, acquaintances staring at her for too long, and her mother\u2019s friend suggesting this will be a good story to write about one day.<\/p>\n

Read more The Audacity of Occupy Wall Street<\/a><\/p>\n

In order to file a report for her stolen items\u2014a passport, a health card, a driver\u2019s license, a replacement visa to the United Kingdom\u2014LaBarge completed a form called the \u201cSchedule of Loss,\u201d a portentous name for a banal sheet of paper that is submitted to insurance companies, courts, or tribunals for victims to receive compensation. When she visits the Ontario Health Care Office, a desk clerk, bewildered by LaBarge\u2019s lack of identification and her inability to prove her own identity, accuses her of committing health-insurance fraud. \u201cYou burst into inconsolable tears for the first time since It happened, petty bureaucracy truly the last dehumanising straw,\u201d she writes, relating the experience in the second person. LaBarge\u2019s reconstruction of the incident cements her estrangement from her immediate post-traumatic memories, as if the thing didn\u2019t happen to the version of herself who is writing the book, as if multiple Emily LaBarges exist at once.<\/p>\n

This splicing of identity hints at a later section in the book, where she burrows into David Lynch\u2019s oeuvre, particularly his attention to time and trauma and his use of doppelg\u00e4ngers in Mulholland Drive<\/em> and the television series Twin Peaks<\/em>, in which Maddy Ferguson, Laura Palmer\u2019s identical cousin, is also killed by the same man. It seems impossible that it could happen again, and to a girl who looks almost exactly like her murdered cousin. But it does, and it will. \u201cThe Lynchian event is ongoing, protracted, diffuse. The event is happening again, it is happening all the time,\u201d LaBarge concludes. The connection is implicit to her own life: The Lynchian event is a filter to make sense of her traumatic event. Battling symptoms of post-traumatic stress while composing a book connected to the traumatic event makes it possible for the memory to seem present everywhere and in everything.<\/p>\n

In a bureaucratic context, schedule<\/em> means \u201clist,\u201d but as LaBarge multiplies the Schedules of Loss in her life, the word\u2019s more pedestrian meaning, \u201ca procedural plan that indicates the time and sequence of each operation,\u201d comes to the fore. It relates to a sense of time and order. As she layers these schedules on top of each other, LaBarge muddies the linear time frame. \u201cThe real Schedule of Loss,\u201d she writes, \u201cis its other side, boundless, an endless tally, what you cannot find words for, what you are too afraid to say\u2014as if it might conjure something awful\u2014what feels like a dark hole in your heart beating through your throat or tar pouring out of your eyes.\u201d It is dreadful because she has foisted an impossible task upon herself: to write what cannot be written.<\/p>\n

The Schedule of Loss is a useful narrative framing device, connected to the traumatic experience but also a prism through which to structure her story. Still, one wonders if the Schedule, or another structural principle, could ever sustain Dog Days<\/em>, as LaBarge is determined to deviate from the book\u2019s initial intention: to understand the traumatic event through her encounters with art, literature, and theory. The avoidance of a legible personal narrative, and the insight its construction may bring, is central to her project. \u201cDeath is the ultimate unreadable event,\u201d she writes, \u201cunassimilable to meaning for the living no matter how we theorize its passage in time, its deprivation as full or void of meaning, past or future.\u201d LaBarge, who has escaped death, cannot bear to \u201cread\u201d the event, because in doing so, she faces death. So she returns to what she knows: writing about books and art.<\/p>\n

Dog Days<\/em> begins with her therapist, Pierre, urging her to lie in the same contorted position that she lay in during the attack, for the same amount of time. This, he insists, will purge her of the bad feelings. Skeptical, LaBarge never attempts this physical exercise. However, several paragraphs later, she finds mimetic versions of this traumatic pose through music and art. The robbers played religious choral music during the event, an effort to mask any incriminating noise. The disc in the CD player happened to be Agnes Dei<\/em>, a compilation of classic religious choral music sung by prepubescent boys. This soundtrack, which played over and over in her head after the fact, leads LaBarge to a reading of Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s painting of the same name, Agnus Dei <\/em>(circa 1635\u201340). The painting, one of several he completed on the subject, portrays a lamb lying down, hooves tucked uncomfortably beneath its torso, and near death. \u201cMaybe he is too human or not human enough or somewhere in between, somewhere impossible and protracted, where someone else makes the ultimate decision about life and death,\u201d she writes of Zurbur\u00e1n\u2019s creature.<\/p>\n

This is where LaBarge is at her best: Her literary and artistic mind flickers with unlikely associations, alighting on one that illuminates meaning for her traumatized self. After the robbery, she sees this painting of the lamb differently; its title forever links it to the event\u2019s soundtrack, while the lamb\u2019s pose mirrors her own experience within the event, perpetually hovering between death and life. This accrual of post-traumatic experiences provides her with a unique perspective: Only LaBarge could take us down this particular associative thread, and in so doing derives fresh meaning from a painting composed in the 17th century. And that, in the end, is the stuff of great criticism.<\/p>\n

In moments of close reading, as with Zurbur\u00e1n\u2019s painting, LaBarge\u2019s critical prowess emerges. Reading Woolf\u2019s novel To the Lighthouse<\/em>, she fixates on a sentence: \u201cMr. Ramsay stumbling along the passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out.\u201d The repetition in the sentence, LaBarge evocatively writes, \u201cis the stutter of language, like life, marked by grief.\u201d The \u201cbut,\u201d segmenting the near-identical clauses, is a reminder of an absence, a gap in time or circumstance, the lack. This formulation is enticing to LaBarge, so she tries Woolf\u2019s \u201chaunting syntax\u201d on for size: \u201cShe sits down at her desk to write, but, she sits down at her desk to write.\u201d Will this sentence do the trick? she asks herself. Does this particular gap fit my particular grief? In this fashion, LaBarge enters the work of writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers to find, like Goldilocks, what feels just right <\/em>about their particular methods.<\/p>\n

While reading and thinking about Dog Days<\/em>, I remembered an illustration from an elementary-school science textbook explaining the concept of refraction, which occurs when light passes from one medium to another. The illustration depicted a pencil suspended in a clear glass of water, and it appeared to be broken, warped, or impossibly bent. Like the pencil in the water, LaBarge refracts herself through critical analysis. And the result is a book filled with intriguing, even brilliant, moments that inspire innocent awe not unlike that which comes from beholding one of the mysteries of perception. But in the end, by definition, Dog Days<\/em> cannot cohere. And this lack of wholeness makes for a discouraging experience for the reader, as the sections of critical writing crescendo toward conclusions that never sound.<\/p>\n

LaBarge concludes the book with a string of sentences in the double negative: \u201cIt matters that I didn\u2019t not survive, I didn\u2019t not confront the conundrum of life, I won\u2019t not go on, I didn\u2019t not find a way to use language, even if I didn\u2019t quite not die, didn\u2019t quite not live on the 22nd day of December, 2009, at 2am of the clock, Eastern Standard Time,\u201d and so on. Grammatically, each clause leaves both realities open for consideration, for critical analysis, for further connections to art objects. Dog Days <\/em>refuses the traditional argumentative structure that criticism provides; similarly, it defers the promise of self-knowledge that comes with a memoir. (\u201cI am looking, it seems, for aesthetic correspondences to a sense of both desolation and supplication, though it is not clear to whom my entreaties are directed or even what they are,\u201d she admits.) It is not not a book of critical essays; it is not not a literary memoir; it is not not a mystery novel where we never find the killer; it is not not an ex-voto on the altar of literary criticism. But, and I can say this with certainty, it is the representation of a luminous, well-read mind relinquishing the need to make sense of life through a conventional narrative.<\/p>\n

Read more The Bitter Paradox of German Racism<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nEmily LaBarge\u2019s Life Stories - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=663\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Emily LaBarge\u2019s Life Stories - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=663\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-20T12:11:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"15 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=663#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=663\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Emily LaBarge\u2019s Life Stories\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-20T12:11:41+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=663\"},\"wordCount\":2990,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=663#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/8c170b9bf5a34965ec32d85aead8f887.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Interesting\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=663#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=663\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=663\",\"name\":\"Emily LaBarge\u2019s Life Stories - 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