Left Unsaid

In its review of Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days, in May, the New York Times was effusive, praising how the debut braided “memoir with criticism, psychoanalysis with poetry, fiction and even quantum physics.” Dog Days was a testament to LaBarge’s ability to “make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive.”

Peer into the comments section, however, and one finds an interpretive battleground, with a vast number of readers panning both the review and the book as frustratingly opaque, withholding, and “twee.” One reader, invoking the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, maintained that a memoir refusing to clearly name its central event breaks a fundamental promise to confront horror directly, by subjecting it to the clarifying discipline of language. “If you propose to write about it,” they suggested, “put your weight on it.” Others argued that forcing a conventional, novelistic arc onto sheer terror is inherently disingenuous — that it reduces a fractured psychic reality to mere “trauma porn” for onlookers.

As I read Dog Days, I found myself oscillating between these two camps. By refusing to plainly narrate the inciting incident — a terrifying eight-hour home invasion by masked men during a Caribbean holiday — LaBarge refuses the work of making meaning. Her prose is a stunning monument to the black hole itself, offering the reader no way through the dark, only a perpetual circling.

It is a striking contrast to The Silence of Falling Snow, by Kristjana Gunnars. While Gunnars’s text occupies the same heavy, grief-laden territory — and similarly comprises an idiosyncratic hybrid of personal storytelling, cultural criticism, and critical theory — it pushes against the norms of the genre in vastly different ways, ultimately reaching a separate destination. Like LaBarge, Gunnars openly confesses that language is insufficient, that it is not up to the task of fully narrating the extremities of human experience. Yet where LaBarge orbits the void, as it were, Gunnars chooses to inhabit the ruin. She treats the world beyond language less as a site for formal redaction or repetition and more as an expansive space of contemplation.

To better understand how these writers diverge so dramatically, we must consider the crises they endured. Gunnars, an emeritus professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies, is navigating the loss of her husband following a sudden diagnosis and subsequent palliative care — a period of profound sorrow that in the end allows for a mosaic-like montage of experience. LaBarge, a Canadian critic based in London, was ambushed. Her trauma is born of a brief, terrifying emergency that instantly shattered her sense of security. Perhaps there is a fundamental difference between the hypervigilant posture that follows a bolt out of the blue and the slow work of mourning a spouse’s death. For, when placed side by side, Dog Days and The Silence of Falling Snow suggest that the form a memoir takes is invariably shaped by the nature of the wound itself. They show us two radically singular ways a writer can assemble the unspeakable.

If some online commenters were pricked by LaBarge’s withholding narrative, it is because they expected a vulnerable life story and instead encountered a voice that uses exegetical detours to shield — and circuitously explore — the reality of a post-traumatic mind. By burying her personal narrative beneath a massive, eclectic archive — ranging from the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein to the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, alongside astute readings of film, art, and literature — LaBarge challenges norms of the memoir genre. While she finds community in the library she plumbs, from Sylvia Plath to Alice Munro and far beyond, her reader often becomes frustrated by the inability to commune with the narrator of Dog Days except, vicariously, through other writers. As the chapters press on, her dense bookshelf risks hardening into a veritable wall that encloses her within her own trauma, blocking any sustained connection with the reader. Indeed, Dog Days occasionally feels like a fortress: a record of a mind working relentlessly to contain a shock it cannot escape.

When LaBarge does offer concrete details, they arrive not as a linear crime report but as a nightmare of sensory repetition. We learn that during the Christmas holidays in 2009, six armed men invaded her vacation rental on a “low-lying coral island in the Atlantic Ocean,” just ten minutes after the family had turned on Mrs. Doubtfire. What followed was a surreal captivity scored by a CD titled Agnus Dei, a compilation of choral music chosen by one of the intruders. As the album played “again, and again, again, again,” the high, pure voices of the choir became the soundtrack of psychological torture. LaBarge monitored the passing hours by the repetitions of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, eventually hallucinating that she was witnessing her own death mass.

This is the point of fracture where a straightforward narrative arc becomes impossible. If survival required enduring an hours-long anticipation of death, then the mind could not later arrange those memories into a tidy story with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, “The End” became an unbidden presence that returned for years after, summoned by “images, asides, happenstance, like an errant punctuation mark.”

It is this errant punctuation that defines the book’s controversial style. LaBarge’s prose mimics the hypervigilant, splintered state of a post-traumatic mind. Language itself breaks down under the weight of the memory; whole swaths of text are redacted on the page. In a gesture of fixation, she creates peculiar, repeating riffs on phrases like “Noli me tangere” (Touch me not), while obsessively dissecting the shape of the letter T. For LaBarge, digressive readings of other texts, poetic repetitions, and linguistic erasures are the only viable ways to map a psyche that has been blown apart.

If LaBarge’s prose is a map of a psyche under siege, The Silence of Falling Snow belongs to another atmospheric order. Gunnars introduces us to a world not of sudden, violent breach but of a slow, solemn crossing in Oslo. Her prose carries the resonant weight of a secular liturgy. “This is a story,” she begins. “It is a story about someone accompanying another to the last gate. The last gate we have to go through and the last train we have to board.” Almost immediately, Gunnars derails this expectation of a fixed linear trajectory by swapping metaphors, opting instead for a more wayward, furtive companion: “But perhaps it is just a story about a white butterfly that flies beside you when you are walking on your journey. You do not know where the butterfly is headed or what it is saying, or why it is flying in such an irregular way. But it is there, and you are walking and flying together.”

By framing her memoir around a fragile, irregular witness — around the act of accompanying and being accompanied by — Gunnars immediately establishes that her grief, however devastating, is rooted in relation rather than isolation. Her choice of the white butterfly, a symbol that reappears, is suggestive of how she treats death as a mystery that requires loving attention, not as a mere destination.

This disposition gives rise to a lovely, accessible aesthetic. Gunnars strips her prose down to its barest essentials; hers is a stark, deceptively simple style. She does not believe that language is fully up to the task of narrating the extremities of loss; she openly acknowledges its deficits. Yet Gunnars does not treat those limits as a trauma to be blacked out with steely Xs. They are, instead, ceramic shards to be patiently considered.

In a moment of self-conscious metacommentary, she warns that the journey that she and her husband took was neither a “walk in the park” nor a “piece of cake,” as clichés would have it. “So long as we are breathing the air,” she recalls, “we are inside something we have to endure.” Her prose mimics this unyielding duration; the book offers no easy pacing or novelistic escape, perhaps because grief itself offers no shortcuts.

Paradoxically, the reader never feels constrained by this requirement of endurance. Gunnars populates an extended space with an immense generosity of thought, offering capacious, deeply felt reflections that make her text feel like a sanctuary. Like LaBarge, she engages with cultural criticism, art history, and philosophy. But she also turns to a meditative lexicon, pairing her sorrow with contemporary essays like Pico Iyer’s writings on death, Jacques Derrida’s reflections on blindness, and Karl Popper’s concept of “piecemeal engineering”: the realization that an incoherent universe cannot be fixed with grand gestures but must be navigated in small, deliberate “mouse steps,” as Gunnars puts it. Such broader engagement serves a generative purpose. To tie together the loose, flying shreds of her unravelling grief, Gunnars reaches for what she calls the “tough threads” of Gautama Buddha: love, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity.

Here we see Gunnars’s alternative mode of storytelling in practice. Rejecting the conventional narrative “about the predatory function of a hero,” she echoes the critic Jonathan Culler, who suggests that story can instead be a collection of things — like the contents of a huge desk, with a jumble of random things kept in a certain place. Crucially, her stories are not quick “healing” words; rather, they represent a vital attempt to reunite the fragments of a life on the verge of disintegrating. Invoking the Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura, she reminds us that a broken tea bowl is not necessarily repaired right away; it may sit in a pile of bits for generations. True repair cannot be rushed; it might require a lifetime of waiting, a prolonged willingness to simply bear witness. “I decided,” she writes, “that this was my time to behold. My time to behold a world being put back together. Just like a large ceiling rotunda in a great Roman cathedral, all in a mosaic of broken bits and pieces.”

It is through piecing together the shattered, luminous fragments of her mind that Gunnars offers a distinct experience for the reader — one of beholding. Both writers demonstrate that when personal recollection resists narration, a shared cultural archive becomes a potential opening, a bridge of connection. While LaBarge’s library occasionally feels like a protective perimeter around an unresolved abyss of terror, Gunnars invites us to sit patiently at the threshold of grief.

Such divergence may explain why LaBarge’s reception has been so polarized. Ultimately, the deep divide in the New York Times comments section reveals less about the quality of her craft and more about the reading public’s discomfort with the vocabulary of sudden shock. We are a culture conditioned to expect a “good story,” she notes: a predictable, digestible plot line where suffering is neatly translated into wisdom. Yet LaBarge’s project is fiercely, deliberately anti-liturgical; even when she attempts to voice a universal solidarity, asserting that “what happens to you happens to me happens to everyone and everything,” the prose cannot escape a claustrophobic effect.

Gunnars, too, resists offering up a version of the good story, noting via the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason that certain catastrophes are simply too immense to look at head‑on. Because staring directly at the sun only blinds the observer, one must write about such events “by not writing about them.” Recalling Derrida, Gunnars acknowledges that experience, when we try to remember it, can only ever be a ruin — fractured even while it is being lived.

Especially when read together, Dog Days and The Silence of Falling Snow emerge as vital, uncompromising anti-memoirs precisely because they reject the solace of the tidy story. One restlessly circles the crater, the other pensively gathers the fragments.