Narrative Amid Trauma: Emily LaBarge in conversation

In this wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful conversation, writer Emily LaBarge speaks with host Adam Biles about Dog Days, her groundbreaking new work of nonfiction. Rooted in the 2009 hostage event she and her family survived while on holiday in the Caribbean, the book explores not the incident itself but the psychic “mark” it left—its shape, depth, and resistance to narrative. Emily discusses the instability of storytelling after trauma, the pressure to produce coherent versions for police, insurers, or therapists, and the unsettling sense that the world itself had changed in the aftermath. She reflects on the limits of therapy, the body’s relationship to memory, and how literature, art, and cinema became “fellow travelers” in her attempt to understand the experience. Adam and Emily also consider genre, experiment, and the essay’s capacity to hold fractured thought. Dog Days emerges as a radical, erudite, and emotionally exacting exploration of what it means to live on after rupture. Buy Dog Days: * 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, amongst others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. Dog Days is her first book. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You can listen to Narrative Amid Trauma: Emily LaBarge in conversation online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Narrative Amid Trauma: Emily LaBarge in conversation is an episode from Shakespeare and Company by Shakespeare and Company.

This episode is 52:05 long.

This episode was published on Jan 21, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Shakespeare and Company when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.