The Allure of Elsewhere: Chasing Landscapes, Family, and the Road Ahead
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.
In her mid-thirties, happily single if also tied closely to a family that has long thought of her as their historian, Karen Babine hitches up her Scamp and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia, to find 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 history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about where she is in life and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship and attachment to home 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.
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Praise for All the Wild Hungers
"Profound . . . Anyone who has experienced a family member's struggle with cancer will be stabbed by recognition throughout this book . . . In the end, the overriding hunger referred to in this lovely book's title is the hunger for life . . . Praise, sympathy and thanks to Babine, who has given us this ode, lament and meditation." --Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Babine exudes a passion that is inseparable from action . . . She is cooking against cancer . . . All the Wild Hungers is composed, in both senses of the word, calm, and put together with care." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"Transportive and vivid . . . Babine's writing brims with tenderness--for her family, her home, and the food she prepares--warming readers' hearts." --Publishers Weekly
"For the author, food sustains like a lifeline or even a bloodline. . . . [Babine] continues to navigate her way through extraordinary challenges with ordinary comforts, finding poetry in the everyday. Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances." --Kirkus
"A lush gem of a book, both heartbreaking and heart-making. Karen Babine's language is the plush dough she kneads, her observations as elastic as gluten bubbles. By the book's conclusion you will become a child again, standing on a chair to peer into the pot, not wanting the process of making--of cooking, of understanding, of as she says, 'consuming the knowing'--to ever end."--Amy Thielen, author of Give a Girl a Knife
"In this beautiful and haunting book, Karen Babine leads us into the kitchen and cooks healing meals for her mother and herself. With humor and imagination, she names each of her cast iron pots, reclaimed from thrift stores, and simmers the elements of grief and longing, hope and love, with acceptance, insight, and wisdom."--Beth Dooley, author of In Winter's Kitchen: Growing Roots and Breaking Bread in the Northern Heartland
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