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WINNER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir of home and family, from a stunning new talent, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'A major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade' New York Times Book Review
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the house would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's THE YELLOW HOUSE tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the 'Big Easy' of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority and power.
Author: Sarah M. Broom
Paperback Published 28 June 2021 400 pages
Originally published in trade paperback 14 January 2020
“[An] extraordinary, engrossing debut . . . kinetic and omnivorous . . . [Broom] pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir as a genre to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, The Yellow House is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. It is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large.”―New York Times Book Review
“[A] forceful, rolling and many-chambered new memoir.... [Broom's] memoir isn’t just a Katrina story ― it has a lot more on its mind. But the storm and the way it scattered her large family across America give this book both its grease and its gravitas.... This book is dense with characters and stories. It’s a big, simmering pot that comes to a boil at the right times.... This is a major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade. There are a lot of complicated emotions coursing through its veins. It throws the image of an exceptional American city into dark relief.”―New York Times
“The memoir from Louisiana native Broom tells the story of her mother’s beloved shotgun house in east New Orleans and the family she raised there. The house was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and Broom writes about the racial and economic inequality that has haunted New Orleans for decades. Author Heidi Julavits called the book “a masterpiece of history, politics, sociology and memory.”―Los Angeles Times, “7 Highly Anticipated Books to Get You Through the Dog Days of August”