Unveiling Solitude: How Karen Babine’s Memoir Captures the Magnetic Pull of Journeying Alone
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.
