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Emily LaBarge’s Life Stories

In Dog Days, LaBarge blurs the lines between memoir and criticism

Emily LaBarge’s Life Stories

In “Dog Days,” LaBarge blurs the lines between memoir and criticism.

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—her anxieties and desires—without 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’s 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’s 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’s 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.

Emily LaBarge is a critic who toes this line in her first book-length project, Dog Days. 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, 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 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 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, LaBarge briefly references both Nelson’s The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial and a book by the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, to which Olivia Laing (no relation) often refers in her work.

The forebears of this practice include the critics and memoirists Joan Didion and Vivian Gornick, both of whom are included in Dog Days’ epigraphs alongside one from Butler. Neither Didion nor Gornick fit into a singular label, be it “critic” or “memoirist.” 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, LaBarge circles the mysteries of Didion’s writing more persistently than Gornick’s. However, I would argue that Gornick casts a wider, if more implicit, shadow over Dog Days: Gornick’s tireless circling of certain literary passages throughout her life resembles LaBarge’s own dogged persistence throughout the book. In LaBarge’s review of Gornick’s 2021 memoir, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, a sentence from its concluding paragraph reads like a prescient summary of her own book: “We are all patchwork and collage, haunted for better or worse by our experiences and ideas, and how we have tried to reckon with them—in life and in writing.” LaBarge briefly returns to Unfinished Business in her book as a touchstone of “what keeps a work of non-fiction alive and meaningful: the risk of self-knowledge, with its Janus faces both appealing and grotesque.”

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. “Their 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,” she writes. LaBarge diagnoses this phenomenon as pareidolia, “the tendency to perceive specific, often meaningful images or patterns in random or amorphous data.” She argues that her uncanny hallucinations—making patterns from delusions and then making meaning from these patterns—resembles the task of the nonfiction writer.

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........

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