A Writer’s Refusal to Turn Her Trauma Into Material

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.”