Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:00]
Emily LaBarche
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. We are about 10 minutes into watching Mrs. Doubtfire, the good natured 1993 family comedy about a divorcee who impersonates a no nonsense Scottish nanny so he can spend time with his family. I see a flash and movement in the corner of my vision and suddenly the men are there. The film continues to play in the background as they whisper in our ears. We don't want to hurt you, but we will.
- [00:36]
Dani Shapiro
That's Emily LaBarche, a Canadian writer based in London and author of the recent memoir Dog Days. Emily's is a story about trauma, memory and the impulse to make a violent and harrowing story. Somehow a good story, a tolerable story. The ways we attempt to minimize what has happened to us in order to get on with our lives. It's also a story about the failure of language and ultimately the harnessing power of making art. I'm Dani Shapiro and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
- [01:30]
Emily LaBarche
I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario. Ottawa is very beautiful and very nice. That's what people always say. Ottawa is very nice, but it's also very beige. It wasn't the most exciting place to grow up, but it has a very good quality of life because there's a kind of feeling of stability. It's a very outdoorsy place. My family was really interested in outdoors activities, but alongside that my mother worked for the government with the Inuit art department. So I grew up with a sense of arts and culture in a diverse way, being, I think, part of the Canadian imagination, but also part of sort of what you had around you. She studied art history, so we spent a lot of time in museums and galleries. Although she was from a family where she and her siblings were the first to go to university on scholarships and with part time jobs. So I don't think in her house, I don't think they had any books. I think she told me that her first book that she owned was given to her when she was a teenager by her eldest sister. And it was a book on Picasso, which is kind of peculiar. I don't know why she would have chosen it. So that's her side. My dad is a lawyer, Business, tax and estates lawyer. I think he cycled through a bunch of other legal genres, I guess we would call them, before he settled on that. But he found sort of family law and other versions of that practice too personally onerous. Everything always sounds A bit sort of small potatoes in the Canadian version. But Ottawa is the kind of dot com boom. It's like our sort of Silicon Valley, which really doesn't compare at all to the actual Silicon Valley. But he worked with a lot of sort of tech startup companies like Corel, Word Processing, early versions of that. So that's sort of my beginning memory of what they did with their lives. I have a sister who is almost nine years older than I am, and she left home for university when I was nine. We have one of those relationships where one person was a child and one person was a teenager or an adult, sort of quite a bit ahead of the other. I desperately wanted to leave. I wanted to be somewhere bigger. I wanted to be in a big city. And I'm not really sure why I chose the university that I did, because it's a small town university. But I guess I thought, oh, I'll only have that experience once. And in hindsight I would have been much better suited to go to Montreal or Toronto for university. But, you know, past is prologue. But yes, I wanted to leave Ottawa, I wanted to be somewhere else. So I ended up living in Toronto for a couple of years, where I worked in a restaurant and, you know, saved money and tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I had studied art history and English literature, a double major for my undergrad, which was an amazing experience, but as most people in the humanities know, doesn't lead you directly into an obvious job. So I was sort of hanging out, living in a bigger city, going to galleries, meeting new people, just kind of living somewhere different on my own. And then I realized that I wanted to do a master's in art history, but with a focus on modern and contemporary art. And so, sort of on a whim, I applied, amongst other places, to a university in London. And I thought I would just come here for a year, but I ended up staying afterwards.
- [05:02]
Interviewer
How old were you when you moved
- [05:04]
Dani Shapiro
to London and started the Master's?
- [05:06]
Emily LaBarche
I was 24, it was 2008.
- [05:11]
Interviewer
Tell me how you would characterize yourself at that time. You moved to London, you're at university, you're getting your master's, you have begun to sort of identify a path, as it were. What were you like? You know, young woman moving through the world.
- [05:29]
Emily LaBarche
Yeah, it's interesting. I thought about that quite a bit as you, you know, as you get older, you look back and sort of think, how did I get to be where I am? At what point in time was I making specific choices or Just kind of going with what was presented to me. I think that moving to London, it was huge for me. I had been not very happy in university. I think I felt very stifled by the smallness of the town that I was living in and the kind of demographic of the student body, which wasn't very adventurous. I found it quite conservative. And I think, you know, Toronto gave me a taste of a place where there was a lot of different stuff going on and you didn't know everything that was happening in the place that you were. There's this sense of freedom and London obviously is like that kind of on steroids. And it's also a foreign country. I mean, obviously I speak English, but I would say there was like a degree of culture shock, partly because there was so much available, but also, you know, I didn't really understand the politics, the customs. 2008 was a big year politically, because of the financial crisis. And also there was an election the first year that I lived here and I could vote because I'm a Commonwealth citizen. So I spent ages and ages you know, reading the newspaper, reading these political parties, different platforms, because I'm quite obsessed with voting, I guess it's one of your inalienable rights, we like to think. So I was sort of wide open for what was presented to me and I think that I felt sort of new. When you move countries, you really get a different sense of where you grew up, where you came from, what things looked like. There's this kind of as if you're jettisoned out of yourself. I guess maybe it's James AGI who says, you know, you can never go home once you've left. And I think it made me really understand that there was a whole world that I had no real understanding of, that world being Europe, which is quite different once you actually live there than, I think, the kind of North American view of what it's like in London, Paris, that it was incredibly diverse, not always attractive, and really historically fraught. And I think I found that shocking and fascinating. And of course, the arts and culture scene here is extraordinary. So I think, you know, I think I did something every single night by myself. I would see what lecture I could go to. I think I took like, you know, thousands of notes in my little notebooks, which I've. I've not looked at again. But it felt so, so exciting to have all of this possibility.
- [08:12]
Dani Shapiro
It's almost Christmas 2009. Emily is 25 years old, living in London with three flatmates, just embarking on her life in the Art world, a master's degree freshly behind her, and working in a small gallery and sculptor's studio. It's a life. She'll have to leave briefly to go celebrate the holidays with her family. They have a tradition of spending the holidays on, well, holiday, the four of them together in some destination setting. This Christmas. The destination is a Caribbean island. Everyone is coming from different directions, different lives, different continents. Now they meet at a rented house. Some of the details of that trip remain hazy to Emily even now, but others she will never forget.
- [09:00]
Emily LaBarche
There are some things that I don't remember, partly because it was many years ago now, 16 years ago, 17 years ago. So I don't remember, for instance, like, what day we got there. We would usually fly around the 20th or 21st or something. And I think we usually liked to stay over New Year's so that we had that nice span of time. So we had been there for a couple of days. And, you know, you develop these, like, patterns and habits on your. On your trips, such as, like, you know, finding the grocery store that you want to go to, like, stocking up on basic foods and such. And we had spent a couple of days doing that. We had actually been to this island before a few years previous, and we stayed in a different area, and we really loved it because it's a really great place for snorkeling and scuba diving. So there's a really rich aquatic life. And we were excited to be back. It's very beautiful. And we were just settling in. And, I mean, this is a bit peculiar. This will tell you something about what my family is like. But we had developed this habit of every Christmas bringing DVDs to watch in the evening, so, like, choosing films. And there quickly became some tension as to, like, which films should be brought. So I think my sister, who's a, you know, business professor, developed this, like, elaborate spreadsheet where you would put in the films that you wanted, and then, like, people could rate them sort of like one to four. And then we would narrow down the top choices and we would sort of take turns who got to choose the movie for the evening. And this was kind of like one of the rituals. My family really likes the cinema and films in general. So we were watching. It was my choice. And I had fought for years to get Mrs. Doubtfire on the list. I don't know why. I was 25. It's sort of like a childish choice, but I love Robin Williams. And so I was like, finally, my choice, Mrs. Doubtfire. And we were sitting in the living Room, I guess we maybe we had been there for two nights, three nights maximum. And we were watching the film, we were maybe about 10 minutes in or something, when all of a sudden I kind of saw this movement in the corner of my eye. And I looked over to the right and there was a. What seemed to me like a huge group of men. I think there were seven, there might have been just six, it's hard to say. Coming into the room out of the dark, actually they came from the driveway, but there was a sort of passageway between the kitchen and some of the bedrooms. So they came through the middle of the house and then turned the corner, through the open doors into the living room and just started yelling at us that, you know, this was a robbery and to get down on the ground. And so we did. And we waited there for several hours while they ransacked the house, stole people's bank cards, stole our clothes, passports. It was very peculiar because they were obviously locals and it's not a big place, but they seemed to think that it was our house. And they kept asking us, like where the silverware and stuff was. And we had been sort of laughing because it wasn't a really high end rental and there were actually only like four forks and four spoons and four knives. So we had to keep washing them every time we used them. And then these people were asking us, you know, where's your silverware and where's all your other valuables? And we kept saying, you know, we're just renting this house. This isn't our house. So half of the men left with bank cards to go try and take out money, and the other half stayed there and waited. And so we waited and waited as well, sort of lying on the ground with blankets over our heads. My dad, they tied his hands because I suppose they thought, well, he's the male, so he's more threatening. And we just waited and waited and waited and then suddenly they left. And basically that was it.
- [13:10]
Interviewer
In the waiting, what was the feeling to the degree that you even know? And what was kind of the tenor of whatever orders or conversation went on? I mean, were you feeling. Did you have any communication during those hours with your parents or your sister? And also how threatened did you feel?
- [13:34]
Emily LaBarche
Well, I think at first I sort of had this weird feeling that like they were just going to rob us and leave, you know, 15 minutes later. And I remember thinking to myself, like, you know, I wonder if people will be too upset to watch the rest of the movie. I don't know why I was so attached to watching Mrs. Doubtfire. And then it became clear that they weren't going to leave right away, especially when they left half of the people there. I guess, I don't know why. Maybe to threaten us if we had given them the wrong PIN numbers or something. Although we found out later that the bank flagged the attempt to withdraw whatever amount of money is suspicious. So they didn't actually end up getting anything, which sort of makes it feel very futile. And I think after some of them left, we sort of thought, like, I thought, they're gonna kill us. You know, I thought, my life is over. These people are probably gonna kill us. Maybe they'll rape me and my sister and my mom first. Who knows? Like, why else would they be here? What are they gonna do when they come back? I mean, all you kind of have to go on is like horror stories or horror films or hostage films that you've seen. This is where our kind of imagination of things come from. But my sense that my life was genuinely over was so profound that I don't, you know, I think people talk about near death experiences or being afraid that they were going to die during turbulence or something, which, you know, maybe is true, but I had never expected ever to have this feeling of being dead, basically, you know, and just waiting, wondering sort of what would happen to your family. Was I going to see them torture my family? Would I have to watch them kill my family? Would I prefer to be killed first? You know, these kind of horrible things that you just sort of think, I can't believe this, like I'm 25 and I don't get to live any longer. And I think that was the sort of biggest shock. We weren't really able to communicate with each other. My dad was over in a different corner of the room, so we couldn't really reach him. And my mom and my sister and I were all sort of in a row under this, like blankets that they had put over our heads. And I remember when they made us lie down on the ground on our fronts and my sister was whispering, you know, is this real? And I was like, I don't know. You know, that's the only thing I really remember her saying. Later on, we had only little bits of communication. We were quite worried about my dad because he had had a year previous quadruple bypass, heart surgery. So we knew that his hands were tied behind his back and obviously he was lying on his front. So we were, you know, worried he was going to have a heart attack or be seriously injured. And so I can't remember who it was. Probably my mom yelled, you know, he's got a heart condition. Like, I think they hit him on the head with the butt of a machete or something, too. Although he wasn't seriously injured, but he was, you know, abused by them. And so at some point in time, we were yelling at them that. And so they actually made him more comfortable. There are these bullets. Peculiar moments. I don't think they really knew what they were doing either. It became clear to us that, you know, at least one of them who had remained behind from this gang was a teenager. And then I think, you know, at one other point in time, we yelled at them that we had to go to the bathroom because it had been at that point, you know, six hours or something like that. And so they let us go sort of one by one, and the teenager watched each one of us. And my mom at one point yelled out to make sure that we were okay, because I think it was taking a long time or something, and she couldn't figure out what was happening. And when I got back, I think I said to my sister, you know, I have this wine glass stem in my pocket, because I had been holding a wine glass, and it smashed on the ground when I went to lie down. And I was like, I have this wine glass stem. I have these pieces of glass. Because I had realized that one of these teenagers, all he had was, like, a screwdriver or something. And I think I had developed some kind of deranged, you know, escape fantasy where I sort of thought, you know, we better do something or we're just going to die here. And so I was whispering to her about my plan, and she was like, I think you should stop talking. Because she could see behind me through one of the holes in the blanket, a guy with a machete. And so obviously, my plan did not. My plan to escape did not transpire. But those are really the only things that I remember, you know, being able to say. And then at one point, my mother, who was quite feisty, she's a very small, intense person, started yelling at them like, you know, why are you still here? Because I think we just didn't. You know, it just went on and on and on, and there seemed to be no reason. And sometimes you could hear something when one of them watched all of Mrs. Doubtfire, like, laughing at the parts that are funny. And then they put on this sort of Christmas music that we had brought with us and played it over and over and over again, but we couldn't really Figure out you could hear someone walking around. The teenager, I think, was obviously getting drunk because we could hear him making drinks. But we couldn't tell, you know, what on earth was happening. And I think my mom just maybe her sort of protective instincts took over and she was like, telling them to get out and stuff. And they did eventually leave, for reasons I also don't know. So this kind of interminable waiting sort of stretched on and on and took on this kind of really muscular sort of presence that then just was over as soon as it had begun.
- [19:17]
Interviewer
I would imagine, too, that time must have done some really funky things. You know, if it was six hours, it likely, it would seem to me felt like twice as long. And also, in retrospect, like it was like a second.
- [19:31]
Emily LaBarche
Yeah, it was. I think it was about eight hours total. And at one point I fell asleep. I sort of drifted off. It's a really long time. And I assume that we had all had an adrenaline rush. And then it kind of disappears. And then you drift off for a moment and, you know, you wake up on the floor, on this tile floor. So when I look back and try and like, sort of reconstruct during that time what I was thinking or doing, there are kind of intense feelings or images and remembrances, but it's quite a long time. Yeah, as you said, it kind of expands and contracts all at once.
- [20:09]
Interviewer
So then what happened after the intruders finally left?
- [20:14]
Emily LaBarche
I guess it must have been like three in the morning or something like that. We did not have cell phones there. There was just a landline at the house, and it had been cut. So my sister tried to go to the neighbor's house to use the phone. And I don't really know what the rest of us were doing. I think we were just looking around at what had happened. I mean, the whole place was trashed. They, like, cut open sofa cushions. There was chocolate cakes mirrored on the walls. I think we were trying to see what else they had taken. And my sister went next door to see if we could use the phone. And the people who lived there wouldn't let her in. I suppose they thought that maybe she was being held at gunpoint or something like that, which, you know, these people had had guns and machetes and who knows what else. So they said, well, we'll call the police for you. So she came back and we just waited there for the police to show up. And again, you know, I don't remember how many. Two, maybe three. But also this man named Arthur, whose partner owned the house Arrived at the same time. And I don't think we had his phone number. Maybe we did. I don't think that we called him. So it was obvious that the police had told him to come.
- [21:29]
Interviewer
You know, it's a small place, small island, right?
- [21:32]
Emily LaBarche
Yeah, exactly. And Arthur came. He said that the woman whose house it was was unwell, so she couldn't come. He had a bag with, like, a searchlight in it and a gun of his own and some other tools, I think. And he told us that his father was a tracker, so he was going to go down to the beach and see if he could see their footprints and follow them or something, which was all very strange. And the police, meantime, were asking us questions, looking at the house. They told us that they had heard there was going to be a siege in the area, which is a very peculiar word to hear people use about something that has happened to you, because it sounds like a sort of battle. But I think also this is common on this island, home invasions. It's more dangerous now, and people have been, you know, home invaded and actually killed. So we were in many ways extremely fortunate. And then, you know, I think we sort of were looking around, trying to figure out what to take with us, because we were going to go to a hotel for the night because we obviously couldn't stay at the house. And I remember looking around and finding very odd things. Like in the front yard, there was a duffel bag that didn't belong to any of us. And in it was, like a roast chicken, someone's undershirt, and my dad's Kindle, which he was really, really happy about finding. You know, you find yourself in these moments sort of dissociated. You know, I don't think when you have a kind of trauma, you know, people aren't just sitting around breaking down in tears. You're sort of just kind of stumbling around and thinking, like, oh, gee, like, my Kindle is still here. How fantastic, you know? So we were all sort of trying to figure out what had just happened and what we were going to do next. So we went to a hotel and slept for a couple of hours. And then the police or Arthur came to meet us at the hotel in the morning. He had brought some friends, two or three younger guys who were helping bring us around. I don't really understand the politics of what was going on, but, you know, there are gangs on the island. I assume it's very frustrating and also violent and scary for the people who live there. I assume that people know who did this or might have done this, but we were not told any of that information. There was a sense that these guys were looking for the people who might have done it, that since it was Arthur's house, there was some kind of internecine politics amongst them about the fact that it had been wrong. But I don't know, this is me looking back and also thinking at the time that I could feel that something weird that I was lodged in an ecosystem that was quite foreign to me. And obviously it was. You know, we were tourists. And so I think there was this sort of embarrassment on our part as well. Sort of like, you know, we're in this place of our own choosing. Maybe we should have expected that this would have happened, or maybe we should have been more careful or, you know, were these fortunate people in a place where there's quite a lot of privation, which is so often the case with sort of Western tourism. But then obviously, there's a kind of domestic political situation unfolding at the same time that was not super clear. The island is a British overseas territory, which, like many British overseas territories, has been sort of structurally abandoned, but still retains vestiges of the British legal system, including, you know, expatriates or British people who work there in governing roles or as judges, et cetera, et cetera. So there is obviously another issue in terms of the local population, which was black, and then the kind of colonial overseers or the hangover of a kind of colonial rule that were at odds sometimes and then at other times, times working with each other. So there are a lot of things, you know, I just don't understand about this place. And I think that made it more bizarre to figure out what to do. I mean, I don't think that going to the police in any country, including, you know, the UK or Canada or the US is like an easy or necessarily useful experience, but feeling totally confused about the other subtexts that, you know, we could all tell were unfolding. Being confused about what those were and what wasn't being said and which was not really graspable to us, I think, made it feel also very confusing, nefarious, you know, for lack of a better
- [26:03]
Interviewer
word, was the feeling among you and your family just wanting to get the hell off the island, or did the feeling of trappedness kind of continue from when you were literally being held captive? You still couldn't leave the island for a bit?
- [26:21]
Emily LaBarche
Yeah, our passports had been stolen, except my sister's, so we needed to go through the process of filing a police report, which you can use to Travel back to your country of origin with. So you have to present it to the border guards, which is also a weird experience. At every juncture, instead of handing someone your passport, you hand them a police report. But also the governor of the island wanted to see how quickly they might apprehend people and if it would be worth us staying there to identify anyone. My sister and my dad and I really badly wanted to leave. Whether it was because, you know, it made it feel like it would finally end, you go to a really physically different place, you go back home, it's over, it's behind you. Obviously, there's this massive juxtaposition between, you know, Ottawa in the snow and this kind of idyllic Caribbean island. There's this strange disjuncture moving between the one and the two, in any case. And my mother, who, as I said, is an intense and very feisty person, I think just wanted to stay and be on holiday still because she probably felt like, you know, not because it didn't matter to her, but she's the one who did a lot of the planning. I think she really cared about spending the time together. She felt it had been ruined because it obviously had been more than the holiday itself had been ruined. So I think there was this sense that it could maybe be recovered if we just stayed there, but obviously we would have to stay in a hotel. I think that the governor and whomever else offered to put us up in this hotel, but I just don't think any of us could really fathom doing that, other than my mother. She was outvoted, and so we left as soon as we could. I think two days later it must have been. So we stayed another night in the hotel and then left and we got home, I guess on the 23rd or 24th December.
- [28:24]
Dani Shapiro
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Emily's stuck in Ottawa. She can't return to London because her UK visa is printed in her passport and it takes time and paperwork to get a new one. She basically has no ID at all, not even the kind of identification to get new identification. It's a strange and lonely time. Her parents had sold the family home and are temporarily staying in a different house in a different part of town. She doesn't know well. Her sister returns to Kingston, where she lives, and Emily is left with her attempt to process her story and how she can possibly talk about it. To top it off, it's Christmas.
- [29:12]
Emily LaBarche
It's kind of bumping up against these things that then further complicate the situation that you're already in. And I guess, you know, they're kind of designed to be difficult, right? They're not designed to be easy. But then when you're feeling like you need them in order to move or live somewhere or prove who you are and you're in this kind of desperate situation, that's when that becomes quite clear, you know, how difficult it is for some people all of the time. Nonetheless, I was stuck there and it very much felt stuck. I think I had this sense, oh, I'm going to get back to London. I can go back to my life, which I was so excited about. I just need to get out of here. But at the same time, I think I was very sort of dissociated. No one was visibly upset. I think everyone was stoic and probably in shock. I mean, sometimes I look back and think maybe it would have been a better idea to stay there and process what happened rather than just eject ourselves, as if that would somehow put an end to it. But maybe not Also, you know, 2020 hindsight, I don't know what would have made it easier. What was very weird was that it was obviously Christmas, like literally at this point, you know, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and we didn't have any plans, we didn't have any food in the house, we had no plans to see anybody because we were supposed to be away. Most of my friends were not reachable because they were with their families having Christmas. So we were also in this strange bubble of our routine that we had become so attached to every year. Our way of celebrating had dysfunctioned, you know, and kind of exploded in this spectacular way. We were back somewhere that we weren't supposed to be. And we also had nothing to do or nothing to celebrate. And you're sort of in all these places with Christmas music and, and lights and decorations, and it was very uncanny. I think that that time of year became really haunted for me for some time because you have this over the top celebration and cheer alongside this kind of dystopian, totally unpredictable situation that nobody was equipped to understand still what had happened or what we should do next. And so I think for me, thinking about this good story, I wanted to tell my closest friends what had happened because that felt like what you should do somehow. And I don't actually even remember what I told them. I looked back through emails that I had sent at the time and they were quite spare in details. And I think they must have been really odd to actually receive because it was sort of like, well, I'M back home. Because actually, you know, I don't know if I was trying to make it easy. Which I guess is what the good story is. Which I sort of came up with that phrase because, you know, people would really say, that's such a good story. That's a crazy story. As if a story is something outside of your life, it's something that you have tell. It's not something that when you're telling it, is something that you're living through. At the same time, it's sort of encapsulated as something with a beginning and an end. And I don't think it's because people were trying to be callous or unkind. I just think that no one really knows how to frame these unnarratable things. And also, it's not like I could say, oh, you know, my grandmother has died, or I'm getting divorced. It wasn't something quantifiable that our culture or society understands or knows Many people who have been through. I certainly didn't know anyone who had been through a similar situation. And so I don't know if I was trying to make it easy for people to grasp and then just say, are you okay? Which is probably all that I wanted to hear. But I suspect I didn't know what else to say. But the idea of not telling people who are close to me felt like a secret, you know. And I think you're sort of suspended between these two states of not necessarily knowing how to share something, but feeling that if you don't, you're sort of. It's some kind of indictment and that you're hiding something. And I think this is common for a lot of people who have experienced loss, grief, trauma, is that they're living their lives and they have this sense that there's something they know that makes them different that other people can't tell. And I think that for me was a huge struggle. Like, if you meet a new person, are you supposed to just tell them right away that you were held hostage on your holiday because it's something that you're thinking about all the time? Or do you pretend it didn't happen? Or do you wait six months or knowing them for a year before you say, actually, once this horrible thing happened to me? And this, in this sense, the kind of way that we experienced, explain ourselves to people and who we are became very muddled because this good story that I couldn't understand even really what had happened or what I was supposed to say, you know, I lay on the floor for Eight hours thinking I was going to die, which isn't really great party conversation. This became something that I had to turn over and over. And I think sometimes felt like a kind of revelation, sometimes felt like a kind of shame, sometimes felt like a burden, and sometimes felt like something I really wanted to pursue, pretend had never happened. As if I could leave it behind in this other place that we had left so quickly and that I didn't really always remember details about.
- [34:28]
Interviewer
Yeah, I think there's an impulse too, when the story, the good story, is something that isn't part of everyday, most people's lived experience. There's like a desire to make it palatable in some way or to control their reaction so that you don't see the horror on their faces. No matter what you do, there can be this sense of isolation and shame either by not telling or by telling. And the other thought I'm having is that it's like finding a version of the story that will cost you nothing.
- [35:08]
Emily LaBarche
Yeah.
- [35:08]
Interviewer
You know, where, you know, there's language that becomes sort of fluid and rehearsed and familiar, but there's no such thing as it costing you nothing.
- [35:17]
Emily LaBarche
Yeah, I mean, you know, trauma is relational and it's very difficult because we experience it usually individually, even if it's done by us to other people and those other people who do it, witnessing it being part of the trauma or what's done to a victim to humiliate them, to injure them, to control them. But after that is over, trauma is still relational because we live in a world with other people and we have relationships with other people, including ideas of political representation or spirituality or whatever, the things that we think make up the world is the place that we land back in. And I think feeling like I couldn't relate to other people was part of the inability to speak to them in a deep way. I think feeling a sense of shame about having been victimized, you know, which is a word that I really didn't even think about until much later because I sort of thought, well, you know, no one was seriously physically harmed. And of course, being held hostage is like a kind of form of torture in itself. So it took me a long time to understand that that was a word that might have to be used in some contexts. But I think feeling that I couldn't talk about the worst parts, the scariest parts, this kind of death feeling, or these sense that I had died and maybe I was still dead, the aftermath of trauma is part of trauma. And I think not knowing how to share it because you either perceive shame or once you tell it, you think maybe that's all people will think about you. Oh, that's the girl that XYZ happened to. Sort of like how we now say someone has depression rather than someone is depressed. So it's like this thing that can come and go. Rather than that you're kind of marked with this experience. But of course I was marked by the experience and I could probably tell that. And you know, the longer you repeat this three word preci, the more everything else falls away beneath as unutterable. Whereas once it might have been easier to say, but there was no place to say that. You know, I didn't have like a funeral to go to or a support group, which perhaps I could have found. But there was no obvious way, especially as a 25 year old who was living in, you know, a different city where I knew very few people and I had only lived for a year. I think perhaps that made it easier for me to just shove it down because no one knew me. So maybe I didn't have to know that about myself either until it kind of bubbled over and became obviously a problem because I wasn't coping with the experience.
- [38:01]
Dani Shapiro
Emily has returned to London, but she's not the same person who left to go on holiday. She might look the same, sound the same, walk the same, but she is profoundly altered. She develops severe insomnia along with pareidolia, which is a psychological tendency to see patterns in everyday objects and occurrences. Her psyche is working overtime, but there's no quick fix. It's a process. As she writes, meaning is accrued, not bestowed. And this is the work of time and narrative.
- [38:34]
Emily LaBarche
It's interesting, this thing of the event. When this happened, it was 2008, 2009. I mean, there was then and there still is now a big discourse around trauma narratives. I think I did not see what had happened as taking place part in that, because it was this really amorphous thing, you know, it was this really weird, flexible, disgusting sticky span of time that was mostly just filled with horror and dread. And I felt like we had escaped. And I didn't understand that the psychological aspect of it was the trauma. And I didn't understand that reentering the world and not knowing how to be in it and suffering as a result because of that, such as insane insomnia or hallucinations or hearing or seeing things. I did not understand that those were forms of, you know, psychoses basically. So I think calling it the event, I mean, maybe it was a way to make it less horrible, but also to sort of disavow the other things that I thought it might have to sit alongside that I probably felt were shameful or not. Things I wanted to be associated with because I didn't want them to have happened to me. I didn't want to be a victim. I didn't want to be, you know, someone who had been psychologically tortured. I didn't want someone else to have had control over my body and my mind. I didn't want someone to have watched me go to the bathroom. You know, this is a form of. Of humiliation. And so I think the event had to do with that. But it's also, you know, really specifically had to do with this feeling that it was this precise thing that ruptured a kind of before and. And divided life into a kind of before and after and again. You know, I think this is common for victims of trauma. Unless it's been, you know, a really durational trauma, of which there are obviously many. But if there's a kind of single incident, you know, people feel, oh, I used to be this person. Now I'm this person. This was the moment where something changed. And, of course, we're also taught to think that way through the narratives that we read. Right. There's a climax. There's a. There's a defining moment where the narrative turns in the cinema. There's an event that forms the crux of a motion picture. And it tells us where we're going and what the point of it is. And I think that I had borrowed or somehow inherited that as this warping idea that what had happened also had to be this kind of rupture with great significance. And I didn't really know how to see it in a different way. I also didn't know how to see that it was unfolding. I think because of this sense that time is chronological. There's a beginning and end, there's an event that happened. There's the time after. You move on from it, life continues. But none of those were really the things that I felt. And I think that quote that you read about meaning accruing rather than being bestowed really has to do with the complexity around that idea of what the event was and why it helped. And also did not help to use it as a way to think about what had happened.
- [41:52]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's so interesting that the popular literature of trauma hadn't really been written yet. So the way I'm hearing this is almost like, first of all, I think it's a hallmark of trauma to minimize it to, again, because of what you said. You know, it's kind of a story. You just want to send back to the story story. You don't want it, good story or no. And there's comparison. There is the sense that, well, there's always somebody who's had a bigger trauma. So this isn't really that bad. So it's like trauma becomes the secret that one keeps from oneself in a certain way, even while it's impossible. And we live in a world that tells us that closure is a thing.
- [42:29]
Dani Shapiro
The good story has an ending.
- [42:31]
Emily LaBarche
Yeah, it's over. It's over. Why can't you just move on?
- [42:37]
Dani Shapiro
Bessel van der Kolk writes about this. Judith Herman writes about this. The specific cruelty of a trauma rooted in being trapped, in the total collapse of agency. There is no fighting, there is no fleeing. And you're not freezing exactly either. You can only endure. You can only wait. And that kind of helplessness, research tells us, is among the hardest to integrate, to find some way of carrying it inside a life that still has to be lived. For Emily, the carrying takes almost a decade. The dog days, she calls them. And only slowly, gradually, does she begin to understand and confront the reality that shame has attached itself to what happened. Shame, of course, being one of trauma's most unwelcome companions. The pervasive feeling that you have done wrong after you have been wronged, as if the wound itself isn't enough. The shame follows. Her lurks. And years after the island incident, Emily is working at another gallery in London when her agency is yet again threatened. But she won't let it collapse entirely, not this time. She's mugged and thinks, no, you can't do this to me.
- [43:59]
Emily LaBarche
That was particularly unfortunate, not just because of being mugged and losing my laptop, but also, I think, you know, most people who've had a trauma, that's like a kind of near death event, let's say, like, you know, a car crash or whatever you sort of think, well, the likelihood of this happening again is slim to none. I've survived and now I'm safe because I'm probably not going to get mugged or held hostage like a bunch more times in my life. Of course, there's no guarantee, right? Nothing happens to any one person for any reason. Which is, I think, another one of the questions that's really attached to that of trappedness that you mentioned, that Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman talk about this kind of. There is no why. So what are you going to do with that question. But in any case, I was sort of thinking, oh, you know, I'm. I'm managing okay. I have this job, I've done my time circling the drain or having this terrible experience. And we were installing a show at the gallery and so the desk that we used had been moved to the front of the room because we were installing in the back. So I was visible from the window. But it was very small and quite a busy street because it was a lunch market. And someone came in. This guy came in wearing a motorcycle helmet. And I thought that was odd because you would think that someone would take it off. This was before there were so many Deliveroo Uber Eats people, you know, who are now in these really time pressure jobs where they're picking up food so they run in with their helmet on. And I found it unusual. And I had this feeling in my stomach like, what is this guy even coming in here for? We're an art gallery. It's not open. And he asked me for directions and so I told him. And I had this feeling that I should shut my laptop and pull it towards me, but I didn't because, I don't know, I was naive and didn't think, oh, this guy's going to try and steal my laptop. And. And he asked me again and I told him again. And then he sort of lunged towards me and grabbed my laptop. And I had headphones on that were plugged into the computer. And so it kind of pulled me out of my seat towards the door as he was running out. And there was like a getaway motorcycle outside with someone else on it. And so he went to go jump onto the back and I. I don't recommend this, by the way. I think I was just on a kind of like massive adrenaline surge. And I was so angry that I ran after him and grabbed his coat and he almost fell off the motorcycle. And then I slipped in a puddle and fell on the ground and he got away. And this man who lived across the street, who, this is funny, but years later, I ended up living in the same area and near the barbican and in the barbican for part of the time. And I used to see this same man around who had come and helped me. And I remembered that it was him because he had two of those very high tech prosthetic legs from the knee down, you know, like the ones that kind of like Olympian runners have. And I had never really seen them before, so he was quite distinctive looking. And he came over and said, are you okay? He helped me Call the police. I don't really remember what happened. My boss was down the street getting his haircut and getting like a shave or something at this Turkish barber because we had an opening the next day and I had said, yeah, go ahead. And I was trying to lock the door and I just could not hold. I was throwing the keys around. They were all over the ground. And I just did not have control of my hands. And that was a very weird moment. I mean, I've said weird a lot, I realized, during this conversation. But it was, you know, these things that you sort of look at yourself and not know what you were doing or what was happening to you. People talk about how trauma resurfaces later in a subsequent experience. And I suppose, you know, that was one moment where finally my body, other than insomnia, but physically I could look at myself and see that these hands were doing something I had control of and I couldn't stop them from shaking.
- [47:56]
Dani Shapiro
We'll be right back. During those years of the dog days, Emily's family upholds its tradition of their annual Christmas holiday. Even once going to another Caribbean island. Her sister keeps doing the spreadsheet of which movies to watch. The subtext seems to be, this is behind us. We're getting back to normal. Except we know this isn't the way it works.
- [48:31]
Emily LaBarche
I don't know that it was the greatest idea to keep going on holiday Christmas, but we had sort of backed ourself into this corner of that being our tradition. You know, we didn't talk about it as a family. And I don't think that anyone would have objected if somebody brought it up and said, look, I'm really upset about this. I'm really struggling. But that is also not something that we really do in my family. And I, again, I don't think it's because anyone's unkind or doesn't care. There's just a toughness, a kind of get on with it. We just didn't really talk about it. And I think there was this sense too, oh, if we just keep going on this holiday together, it will be like it never happened. We weren't defeated. Our way of doing things was not taken from us. We can just carry on. But of course, on those holidays, I became very paranoid and couldn't really sleep and had a lot of sort of intrusive, cycling thoughts because things were getting worse and worse for me because I obviously had, you know, retrospectively, like a kind of post traumatic stress disorder. But I think I thought, well, you know, I can still get up and function. So it's probably just like a difficult time and I'm a depressive or something. Also, my sister got married, so she stopped coming on the holidays. That's how we ended up in. In Spain that one year, because I was living in the uk, so it was sort of easier for my parents to come this way. And I think we thought it would be warm, but it wasn't really. And we had these sort of terrible storms. And we're watching DVDs that we actually didn't bring with us. They were in the house, which accounts for the slightly bizarre selection.
- [50:07]
Interviewer
Well, it was interesting because you describe watching on that trip, you know, when you're really at a low point and you're watching It's a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, which were both films made the same year, and you watch them over and over. And the phrase that you wrote about this that I found so striking was you were trying to glean something from these films about how to reintegrate into normal society after a brush with fate. And that reintegrate into normal society is something that we're just supposed to do. And you weren't doing it. You couldn't do it. You were, like, functioning, but internally, it was like you were like one of those characters in one of those films.
- [50:57]
Emily LaBarche
Yeah, I think, you know, looking back, I think the struggle for me was really the sense of not understanding why something happened, feeling like I was no longer myself and feeling like I lived in a different world than anybody else. And that in itself became this kind of enduring trauma of being alienated, misunderstood, and feeling deceased, you know, feeling that I was living in some kind of afterlife. And so the idea of somehow reintegrating, it just felt impossible. And, you know, that's a word that's used a lot in certain kinds of analysis or psychology practices, that the idea for trauma is that you find a way to reintegrate or you integrate the traumatic event into the narrative of the rest of your life. And, of course, it's more complex than that in the way that different therapists work. But I fundamentally felt that that was a lie. That was sort of why I couldn't do it. You know, I just sort of thought, there is no way to do that. So now I live here in this other place, you know, by myself. And I think, you know, in those films there are these kind of famous moments of time being frozen. So in It's a Wonderful Life, there's this moment where George Bailey is in Bedford Falls and he never existed. And It's a completely different place. And he's walking around and no one knows who he is. And he keeps saying, I'm George Bailey, I'm George Bailey, but no one knows who he is. And I sort of felt in that pause that there was this sense that I recognized of my life having been paused, that this could happen in a life. And I was so stunned by it visually and I was so moved by the ending of the film where he finds a way to return to his life, having basically died and ejected himself from it. And it was strange to identify with the protagonist of this film, who's sort of a middle aged family man. But of course it was post war, so in the US and elsewhere there's this reckoning with a return to life after something monumental, changing. And so he was sort of living through this return to life after having been elsewhere. And in a matter of life and death, we have a character who should have died, but there has been a mistake in the afterworld. And so he was allowed to live on Earth for another 24 hours erroneously. And in that time he fell in love with someone. So an angel or the conductor comes from heaven or the afterlife and says, I'm sorry, but you have to come with me. And the character is put on trial and he has to argue for why he is still allowed to live and that his life, in fact does belong to him and that this time wasn't borrowed. And there's a moment in that film where time pauses as well, because every time the conductor comes down to earth, life on earth stops, but the protagonist keeps living. It was kind of extraordinary to me to look back at these films, to see these men who had been through these wartimes scenarios, who were having these experiences that I really related to. And I suppose that artistically and culturally and formally I found that really interesting.
- [54:11]
Interviewer
So do you think that in some way in the watching those films again and again, there was a little dent in the isolation that you had been feeling in terms of the feeling of deadness?
- [54:24]
Emily LaBarche
I think because I've always been a reader and a watcher and also a consumer of images and, and objects in art settings. I think there's always been a sense to me that we look at things made by other people not just to understand our own lives, but to understand how other people face the human project of living and also surviving on earth and with people, which I think is not always easy and involves facing various difficult realities, sort of structural, political, cultural, individual. And so there was a sense to me that I knew that you should look outside of yourself for ways to better understand your own experience through the experiences of others. Or that artwork tells us something in a different way that we can't necessarily just formulate in straight sentences, you know? And I think film is a really amazing version of that because it involves the stuff of life. But it does a lot of fantastical things with them. And I think probably the kind of cinematic experience of that was more striking to me perhaps, than, obviously, I had been reading. There are a lot of short stories and female writers and essayists who I turned to a lot. But those movies somehow did something different. It was like maybe I could make a hole that scrambled time and showed what it was like to move back and forward and live through it. And maybe my understanding of these films through my own perspective of rupture or time travel, in a sense, or stasis, maybe my understanding of those films could be part of that. They could be like this proxy conversation for being stuck. That I could enter the films, that I could have a relationship with the films and describe that, and it would explain the something that I couldn't simply do in a straightforward narrative. And so I think that big moving image aspect of it probably was really striking in a way that other art forms maybe hadn't made occur to me yet.
- [56:31]
Dani Shapiro
In her posthumously published memoir, Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf famously writes, I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me. It gives me perhaps, because by doing so, I take away the pain. A great delight to put the severed parts together. Emily knows this has lived this the way that writing towards something terrible can in turn begin to soften its edges. And yet there's something in Wolff's formulation that resists tidiness. The severed parts are put together, yes, but they remain fundamentally severed. The wholeness is never without its traces of fracture.
- [57:23]
Emily LaBarche
Maybe you can see the sutures, right? If we're talking about it as a kind of body. Maybe you can see the cracks. They don't have to fit exactly. They can never be the same body again. But the making something out of them is what changes the severed parts. And that ability to make choices about what you don't have to fill in either because you can't remember, because you feel it's not interesting, because perhaps conventional narrative demands it. But you don't want to say it to people or to fill the spaces with the words of other writers or other makers. I think was really important to me because I also feel that trauma is collective in a lot of ways. Not that it's shared, not that everyone has the same experience, but we live in this immensely traumatic world, and we don't have ways to talk about that. So people are living these really individual experiences. But actually having my experience and my writing sit alongside other art forms in the book. And, you know, researchers who are foundational to trauma study, like Judith Herman or Bessel van der Kolk, was really important to me, too. Those were part of the severed parts because they were things that I looked at to understand what had happened to me, because I didn't understand. And so I think that idea of a collage or a commonplace book working through other people's writing with my own writing was really important to me in terms of a. I suppose, like a political view of how we talk about trauma as not simply a single story. And that was very freeing.
- [59:03]
Dani Shapiro
Trauma narratives never quite end. Emily eventually learns that one of the hostage takers lives in London, in fact, somewhat near a flat she once lived in. This understandably, spooks her. It stays with her. And so when she happens to meet a private investigator at a party, she takes the coincidence and runs with it. She wants to know more and has fantasies about confronting this man who had been a teenager during the event. She wants to know, what were you after? What did you want? As she writes, I want my information back. She doesn't even know what this means, but she knows it's true. The lost passport, the long wait for identification so she could regain her identification. These were not only metaphors. Emily wants her information back.
- [59:57]
Emily LaBarche
I think when I said that, there were many things that I couldn't remember, and I felt quite shocked and angry about that. And, you know, it's possible that in normal memory, you don't remember everything anyway. But I had this sense that I would never be able to know why I didn't remember it. And something about that felt like some of my existence or some of my experience had been disappeared, like it had been taken from me. And I think in that moment, I actually felt it in this really rudimentary way. I want to know what happened and why and all of these kind of practical details. But, of course, looking back, I think it was like because of this sense of rupture, of a before and after, I felt like if I could answer some questions, practical questions, I would no longer be this person who was potentially missing things that they could have been, but which had somehow been erased in this moment. I think I had a feeling. And this is, again, something that people who have experienced traumas talk about, of a life foreshortened or stalled, that your future is fated because something happened and it has eradicated the possibility, possibility of being who you were in the first place, or having the life you might have had, or being free the way other people are, to make decisions and to know why you are the way you are, whether you chose it or whether it was something imposed on you externally. And I think those kinds of information are linked. But I guess that now it doesn't matter, you know, And I don't know if it's just that it's been so much time. I don't know if it's that I wrote this book which is very much about grappling with the aftermath and answering these questions through looking outward and that being a way of integrating yourself into the world versus integrating things into yourself, or that now there is this book and I made something. Whether I understand what happened or not, this is what I have now. Yeah. So I don't think I got my information back, but I think I made new information. And I think I probably realized that that's what you have. That's the option with life, whether you experienced a trauma or not. You know, no one's responsible for what happened to them, but we are all responsible for what we do with that. And it's easier for some than it is for others, you know, practically speaking. But this is what I've done, and this is who I am now.
- [62:57]
Dani Shapiro
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. Molly Zakur is the story editor, and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is 1-88-8-SECRET0. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram annnyriter. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance.
- [63:34]
Emily LaBarche
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
- [63:39]
Dani Shapiro
listen to your favorite shows.
- [63:42]
Emily LaBarche
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.