A Writer’s Refusal to Turn Her Trauma Into Material

Emily LaBarge was taken hostage with her family on vacation over Christmas 2009. Her memoir acknowledges the gaps in her memory, and the details she won’t share.

There is what happened, and then there is the story of it, the “required repetition of the good story over and over again to friends, family, more officials.” In Dog Days, her memoir of living in the wake of a terrifying event, Emily LaBarge recounts watching people react to her story—what she calls, varyingly, “the good story, It, That Awful Thing That Happened, That Christmas, The Incident, What Your Family Went Through, The Thing, The Home Invasion, and sometimes—though rarely, as it seems too explicit, sometimes embarrassing, which victimhood, because it is helpless, often feels—The Trauma.” Some cannot believe it. Some shrug her off, don’t call her back. Some say they are traumatized by what happened to her and they themselves “will never feel safe again.”

“Some,” she writes, in disbelief, “cry!!” Some fish for details, trying to suss out whether LaBarge was raped. “Imagine,” she writes, “asking someone, casually, as if it were the ultimate salacious detail. They think it is their business, that it is information they are entitled to.” Sylvia Plath called these people “the peanut-crunching crowd” in her poem of death and resurrection, “Lady Lazarus.” In drafts of this book, LaBarge writes, she tried holding off, leaving the big story until the end—but that was “too coy”—and she tried not telling it at all, subsuming it as criticism or philosophy. In the finished version, she neither hides what happened nor accedes to demands for salacious detail.

What happened is this: In the days before Christmas in 2009, when LaBarge was in her mid-twenties, she and her family were renting a house on a “low-lying coral island in the Atlantic Ocean where the waters are cyan, turquoise, azure blue and the sand is the finest pink-flecked white.” Eight men broke in and held the family hostage for seven hours. They had been watching Mrs. Doubtfire when it happened, and the movie, absurdly, continued to play as they were lying there, until, eventually, one of the men switched it off, putting on, instead, a CD of hymns, liturgical chants, and songs for a death mass. “He doesn’t want anyone to be able to hear us,” LaBarge realizes, “when we XXX or XXXX or XXXXX or X.”

Whole pages unfold like this, details marked with X’s, lines blacked out. These gaps are a refusal to perform what Plath called “the big strip tease” for the detail-hungry gawker, but they are also the gaps in a glitching memory. “I did not hear them coming,” LaBarge writes of the men as they broke in. “Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.” She remembers being hurt by a therapist who left a detailed email unread for too long and then responded with too little, but when, in the process of writing this book, she looks back at her inbox to confirm her recollection, she sees that, actually, the therapist had sent a long and loving response in less than 24 hours. She remembers the layout of the vacation home on the island, but when she looks for it later, she can’t find a house that matches.

But certain things stick. As Fauré’s Requiem plays, while she lies on the floor with her family, it begins to sound, to LaBarge, like “a........

© New Republic