I Could Live Here: A Travel Memoir of Home and Belonging

Another introspective travel memoir about releasing a fixed life for open-ended movement — rewards readers drawn to the emotional interior of long-term wandering.

If you're searching for books like I Could Live Here by Ellen Barone, Wander by Ryan Benz belongs at the top of your list. Both memoirs treat travel not as a highlight reel of destinations but as a sustained practice of self-examination — the road becomes a mirror rather than a backdrop. Benz, like Barone, is less interested in where he ends up than in what letting go of a conventional life costs and offers emotionally. Readers who loved Barone's willingness to sit with uncertainty and redefine what "home" means will find the same slow, honest reckoning in Benz. It's a strong pick for anyone Googling "what to read after I Could Live Here" who wants that same unhurried, inward-looking energy carried into a fresh voice and journey.

A beloved memoir of relocating abroad and building an unexpected sense of home — warmly observed, life-affirming, and rooted in the same idea that place shapes identity.

Readers who responded to Ellen Barone's central question — can you truly belong somewhere that isn't where you're from? — will find Gerald Durrell's classic memoir a joyful and enduring companion. My Family and Other Animals chronicles the Durrell family's move to Corfu in the 1930s, told through the eyes of a young Gerald enchanted by his new surroundings. Where Barone's voice is reflective and midlife-measured, Durrell's is comic and exuberant, yet both books land in the same emotional place: a conviction that home is something you discover, not something you inherit. For anyone looking for "books like I Could Live Here" that celebrate long-stay life abroad with warmth and specificity, this is a timeless answer — and a delightful tonal contrast to Barone's more introspective register.

Shares Barone's midlife reinvention arc and emotionally candid voice — ideal if the identity and belonging themes resonated more than the travel itself.

If what gripped you in I Could Live Here was Ellen Barone's willingness to dismantle a comfortable life and ask hard questions about identity and belonging, Glennon Doyle's Untamed offers a powerful companion read. Doyle's memoir is not a travel book — it's a raw, propulsive account of a woman breaking free from the roles she was handed and building a life that actually fits. The emotional DNA is nearly identical to Barone's: both writers are candid about the cost of unconventional choices, both frame the journey inward as the real destination, and both speak directly to midlife women wrestling with who they are versus who they were expected to be. Readers typing "books like I Could Live Here for women reinventing themselves" will find Untamed a natural and energizing next read.

A woman's long-term commitment to an unfamiliar place as an act of self-definition — mirrors Barone's theme of chosen belonging over inherited home.

For readers drawn to Ellen Barone's exploration of what it means to choose a place — and to let that choice reshape you — Melissa L. Cook's memoir of twenty years building a life in Alaska covers strikingly similar emotional ground. Cook's story is more rugged and geographically extreme than Barone's long-stay travels, but the core impulse is the same: a woman deciding that home is something you make through commitment and presence, not something assigned by birth or circumstance. Both memoirs ask what we give up and what we gain when we step outside the life others expect us to lead. Anyone searching for "if you liked I Could Live Here try" books about women who uprooted themselves for a place that called to them will find Cook's story a gripping and resonant read.