How a Real-Life 2009 Hostage Crisis Inspired Emily LaBarge’s New Memoir ‘Dog Days’

In 2009, a family Christmas holiday on an island turned into a traumatic ordeal when six masked men armed with guns, knives and machetes broke into their rental house and held them hostage for several hours. No one was physically harmed. But for the family's daughter, who was in her early 20s at the time, the night's impact would take years, and eventually a book, to process.

That daughter is Emily LaBarge, now a Canadian art and literary critic based in London. Her debut book, Dog Days, published this year, uses the 2009 home invasion as its foundation but resists telling it as a straightforward trauma narrative.

The book opens not with the break-in itself but with a scene of somatic therapy. "Pierre says I should lie in exactly the same position," LaBarge writes, "just like how it happened... until the pain comes out of me."

That instruction, to hold the body in the position of the original trauma until the pain passes through, becomes one of the book's organizing principles.

“The experience in itself was confusing and terrifying to say the least. And that for me is the beginning of the book, but it’s not the end of the book… The idea of working against genre convention is really important for me,” LaBarge said in a conversation with Shakespeare and Company.

During the invasion, LaBarge was forced to lie with a crocheted blanket over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and the choral piece Agnus Dei played on a loop. In the podcast interview, she reflected on what the prolonged waiting did to her psychologically.

“Over a year, the longer this experience went on, the more horrible my imagination of what was going to happen before we were eventually killed became,” she said. “It's common in like hostage takings or, you know, like some of like psychological torture effectively, right? Putting a hood over someone's head and making them wait for many hours is what happens in kind of torture situations.”

She also reflected on the particular quality of trauma that involves anticipating death and then surviving it. "In this moment of really anticipating in a deep way your death, and then somehow there being an aftermath, I think that was really profoundly what I felt," she said. "That life-threatening situation. People are very close to dying, or feeling like they have died, or their life is over, and then have to recover."

The first third of Dog Days cycles through structural experiments to retell the break-in from different angles. The invasion is presented as a minimalist script in which LaBarge appears as "Daughter 1," then reframed in the second person, and eventually rendered partially illegible, with a series of "X"s replacing verbs and nouns entirely.

Jennifer Szalai reviewed the book for The New York Times, writing that "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.”

Szalai added, “Dog Days begins with the lonely violence of waiting to die with a crocheted blanket over her head and ends with a commitment to engage with the world. ‘What happens to you happens to me happens to everyone and everything’: We all share the stubborn fact of our mortality.”

Rebecca Peng of Toronto Review writes, "LaBarge’s analyses are so clean and compelling that she is almost over my shoulder, directing my attention here and then there.”