When I tell people that I write memoir, one of the common responses I get is, How can that be? You’re not old and you’re not famous. It might be the only time in adulthood when I’ve wished to look older. The assumption is that memoir necessitates a legacy, a long life that’s supremely well lived and Worthy of SharingTM. I invoke the old adage that we are human beings, not human doings. Human being-nessis naturally rich and complex. Case in point: the other common memoir trope is that it’s for processing trauma. Fair. A lot of it is, and a lot of it needs to be, because a staggeringly high percentage of the human population has experienced trauma, enough to merit entire manuscripts. The political climate of America isn’t helping. Despite the trauma, it’s important to make time for books that aren’t about suffering or life advice, like The Allure of Elsewhere (Milkweed, 2025), which charts its own memoiristic path on the open road. A road trip may sound like an escape from facing the tough stuff, but the farther author Karen Babine travels in her 13-foot camper, the closer she winds to universal themes tugging on everyone’s hearts about belonging, home, and heritage.
It’s rare to find a beautifully written memoir that’s neither a statement about How to Live or How to Heal. The Allure of Elsewhere is not about human doing, even though Babine gets plenty done on her solo adventure, deftly navigating her Jeep and Scamp camper from one site to the next, despite misogyny, uneven ground, and stormy weather. Reminiscent of the book-turned-movie Nomadland, taking place in roughly the same time period, Babine’s adventure celebrates life in the margins: not just as a woman camping alone, but as a woman in her mid-thirties who defies the usual categorical boxes of “married” (or partnered) and “mother.” Babine is neither seeking romance nor recovering from heartbreak, she is simply being, but with purpose: “It’s not a freedom from, it’s a freedom to, a freedom forward. To do everything because I want to—and because I can.”
Babine drives solo from Minnesota to Nova Scotia in search of ancestry, a bone-deep feeling lying dormant in the genes: “Your bones know where you’ve been, even if your brain does not. [...] Since I carry the DNA of my ancestors, do I carry their places too?” Though trauma hides in Babine’s DNA, she doesn’t focus deeply on it. Her prose is intimate, humbly self-aware, flipping focus from the personal to humanity as a whole. “[A]t what point does individual history become part of the collective?” she wonders, when beholding a mass gravesite. The “emotional shrapnel” of war lodged in her grandfather and great uncle in World War II, and also every soldier who touched a battleground, even if indirectly. The Babine / Babin family immigration story wouldn’t be complete without the historical background of the Acadian expulsion from Nova Scotia in the 18th century. Whether Babine is delving into archives, visiting graves, or passing through town at the very moment a mass shooter is on the run, she balances the personal and the collective through gorgeous turns of phrase, as when she says, “History inflates like an accordion, or a concertina, pulling apart, condensing, and I think I can hear its music.”
The concept of elsewhere works on two levels for Babine, as both a physical adventure away from her day-to-day life and also a step back in time. She processes the meaning of being “from another generation,” whether the context is facing sexist older men on the road, or sifting through marriage records for the baptismal name of her great-grandpa. Elsewhere is an alchemical place where data becomes embodied knowledge. Babine stands on the rippled landscape where coffins were stacked three deep. While sharing a meal with family, she absorbs a relative’s anecdotal line, “He just didn’t smell right,” which in that instance turns a historical data point about a murder into a felt understanding. Babine reflects on the ethics and emotional responsibility of her undertaking as family historian, wondering who has the right to tell stories, especially ones that have been kept quiet. As she puts it, “There’s damage to be done in the quest for FamilyTM.” Babine acknowledges that all people have stories worthy of being told, but the telling isn’t always neutral. Furthermore, not everyone has the privilege of an unbroken and traceable family tree. For them, elsewhere might be ongoing. Without a satisfying terminus. Babine muses that “the function of a campground is in that balance of community, the construction of community, and how we are alone together,” which describes the allure and the promise of elsewhere: a sense of personal contentment alongside a connection to something greater, that bone-deep heritage spanning time and geography.
At a time when uncertainty is the order of the day, and memoir is quite often about tragedy–fraught times and fraught families (of which I too am guilty)–it’s refreshing to take a side trip elsewhere with Karen Babine, who writes with the quiet confidence of one raised by a family that likes each other. Babine’s dad helped her make custom improvements to her camper, including a closet made of PVC pipe. He raised Babine to tinker, build, and make things work. He taught her that duct tape fixes what shouldn’t move and WD-40 fixes what should. Babine’s book is a role model for knowing when to be still, stationary, letting things unfold over a cup of tea, and when it’s time to get moving, even if the cats yowl their disapproval in the background. It’s my chosen “vacation read,” a respite from duct taping and WD-40-ing my own work, without leaving quality craft behind.
Sasha Bailyn holds a dual-genre MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and scholarship is forthcoming and published in Glint, Wayne State University Press, The Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts, The Maine Review, The Bold Italic, and others. In 2024, she was awarded the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar award by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. She has presented papers through the London Arts-Based Research Centre and Cambridge University.