Reviewed by Marissa Gallerani
In her mid 30s, childless, and single, Karen Babine decides to take a roadtrip to learn more about her family’s Acadian roots. Her route takes her from her home state of Minnesota, up through Canada, down to Maine, and then back across the Midwest.
Babine’s memoir, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo (Milkweed Editions; May 2025) is a record of that trip and includes her musings on the nature of memory and the stories our families tell.
Babine has been her family’s historian since she was 17 and learned that her great-grandmother and her great uncle (her grandfather’s twin brother) were murdered by another family member experiencing a psychotic event. Her search has taken her to archives across the country and to the depths of Ancestry.com. The purpose of the roadtrip is to actually see the places her family came from, and perhaps to break the silence that has reigned in Babine’s paternal family for so long.
Despite growing up with her grandfather and having a relationship with him, Babine never hears him talking about his family – even when directly asked. Her grandfather “steers [the conversation] away so deftly that I won’t realize what he’s done till later.” Babine theorizes that her grandfather does not speak about his past as it’s too painful, and she comes to accept that “silence is not always a failure, that we need to respect the choice to stay silent where it exists in a story.” Everything she now knows about her family comes from different witnesses, or documents. Her frustration with the familial silence is relatable, as many people relate to this need to understand where they came from.
The book’s subtitle, ‘A Memoir of Going Solo,’ implies that this book would be solely about Babine’s roadtrip and experience traveling alone. This is incomplete at best. While yes, the road trip is important to the narrative, Babine also spends copious time exhuming family histories and discussing what the nature of family history is, how those narratives are built, and how she should integrate this information going forwards.
As Babine drives, her narrative is intercut with stories of her family and previous camping trips. The writing here is fluid and reminiscent of converging timelines. While some of the stories overlap with each other, her family stories are interesting, and I am in awe of how much she has been able to trace her family’s lineage.
I felt a deep kinship with Babine as I read. We are similar on so many levels from the macro (single, childless women who travel solo in our 30s) to the micro (we both had grandfathers who fought in WW2 and received the Bronze Star, yet never heard them talk about it.) Even though I have never been camping a day in my life, I resonated with Babine’s depictions of benevolent sexism she encounters while driving and the deep contentment that comes from traveling alone.
The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo is a meandering journey through time and space and for anyone who has sought understanding of their family’s complex history.
Marissa Gallerani is a queer and disabled writer and teacher living in Providence, Rhode Island. She received her MFA from The Newport MFA at Salve Regina, and has taught at multiple institutions of higher education including the New England Institute of Technology, Salve Regina University, and Write or Die. She has been published in The Harvard Review Online, the public’s radio, and The Financial Diet, among others. Marissa’s Substack, The Chaotic Reader, details her wide-ranging reading adventures. A life-long SFF fan, Marissa is currently at work on a science fantasy novel.
