Nonfiction

The Allure of Elsewhere

A Memoir of Going Solo
By
Karen Babine
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One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.
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One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.

“Camping alone is the only time I have to be what feels like fully myself, fully immersed in the solitude I seem to need to function best.”

In her mid-thirties and happily single, Karen Babine hitches up her tiny Scamp camper and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia to explore the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago.

As the miles roll by, she wonders: “Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can’t—or shouldn’t—happen?” The road reveals more questions than answers about her history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about her life choices as a solo woman, and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship to a very close-knit family on one hand and a deep desire for independence on the other.

Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we’re told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.

ISBN
9781571311825
Publish Date
Pages
288
Dimensions
8.5 × 5.5 × 0.5 in
Weight
16 oz
Cover Art
Author

Karen Babine

Karen Babine is two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer.

Praise and Prizes

  • “What a pleasure to travel with Karen Babine, along highways and logging roads, from campsite to campsite, through time and deep into history. The Allure of Elsewhere showcases a love of geography and genealogy, close family and distant ancestors, fierce independence, solitude, storytelling, and the crafting of a life. Under Babine’s deft attention, places come alive, the dead reanimate, time folds in on itself until centuries feel tangible. ‘It’s all connected,’ she writes, ‘even if we cannot recognize the ways in a particular moment.’ The Allure of Elsewhere shows us how.”

    Michele Morano, author of Like Love

  • “The Allure of Elsewhere is a beautiful unraveling of family history through self-exploration. Just as a winding road reveals its secrets one at a time, Karen Babine takes us through the twists and turns of a complex genealogy and her own place within it. She weaves the story of her chosen solo lifestyle with generations prior who lived the opposite while examining how their history lives not just in our memories, but in our bones.”

    Heather Anderson, author of Thirst: 2600 Miles to Home

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