For the first episode of Season 2, Naomi is joined by writer and art critic Emily LaBarge. We revisit marginalia from her copies of Amy Hempel's The Dog of the Marriage, Joan Didion's The White Album, Sylvia Plath's The Unabridged Journals, and Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? exploring a lineage of library-keeping; book titles lost in translation across continents; forms of intertextual desire; marginalia as a record of life outside the book; the complexity of memory; and the internal rhythms of our prose style, as they develop consciously and unconsciously through our practice of reading and thinking.

Reading List

The Dog of the Marriage, Amy Hempel

The White Album, Joan Didion

The Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

Who Do You Think You Are?, Alice Munro

Selection of related essays by Emily LaBarge

"Best Book of 1978: Who Do You Think You Are?"

"Chantal Akerman's Elusive Interiors: what the filmmaker's portrayal of women reveals--and withholds"

"What Wasn't There"

Purchase LaBarge's debut DOG DAYS

Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer living in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Artforum, mousse, Bookforum, Frieze, The Observer, and The Paris Review, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. She is the author of Dog Days (Peninsula Press, 2025; Transit and Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2026).

Find a copy of Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, New York University Press, or your local independent bookstore. Subscribe to Process Notes for further reflections on reading, subjectivity, and psychoanalysis.