PULSE Book Talk: Writing Trauma with Emily LaBarge and Evan Malater

Join Emily LaBarge, author of the acclaimed book Dog Days, in conversation with psychoanalyst Evan Malater, on the occasion of her first talk addressed to the psychoanalytic community. Free for Pulsion Candidates; Donation Pay-What-You-Wish for general admission.

Dog Days undoubtedly orbits around trauma, though it seems to bristle self-consciously against this fact. Throughout the book, LaBarge rails against testimonies that unwittingly or opportunistically add to ‘the world of Trauma Stories… demanded and peddled and normalised in so many spheres of contemporary culture’. She implies that she is unlike the ‘perfect victim’ who sticks to what’s called the ‘good story’, a socially acceptable narrative of events distilled for insurance companies and fair-weather friends.
-Jenny Wu, ArtReview

As LaBarge contends, “trauma is a narrative problem,” because a digestible story with a cleanly delineated end and beginning, which she terms “the Good Story,” is not truthful since there are infinite entry and exit points to The Event, infinite manifestations of what happened, what could have happened, what didn’t happen, what might still happen, and what it feels like to keep living after and within the happening.
-Jenessa Abrams, LARB

In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and "Agnus Dei" played on repeat. In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, "just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out"--otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find "the good story" neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out? How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.

Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, The London Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days is her first book.

Evan Malater, PhD, LCSW is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.