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by Sarah M. Broom
A transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
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 Yellow 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.
National Book Awards, 2019
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2019
"Broom is an engaging guide; she has some of David Simon's effortless reporting style, and her meditations on eroding places recall Jeannette Walls...Broom's memoir serves as a touching tribute to family and a unique exploration of the American experience." - Publishers Weekly
"A tribute to the multitude of stories one small home can contain, even one bursting with loss." - Kirkus Reviews
"Sarah M. Broom's book is an extraordinary example of how language can make things. Her words, sentences, thoughts as she creates East New Orleans―where she was born―move faster than you will ever keep up―but you damn sure don't want to let go." - John Edgar Wideman, author of Writing to Save A Life: The Louis Till Project
"The Yellow House literally taught me how to read and write. I will never write or read about family, longing, blackness, femininity, joy and state-sanctioned terror the same way after sitting with this book. Broom narratively glides through choppy air almost in slow-motion, and when I least expect it, she digs into the ground of New Orleans conjuring the most humanely massive intervention I've read in 21st century memoir writing." - Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"The Yellow House is a masterpiece of history, politics, sociology and memory. Actually, it's just a masterpiece, period...Broom shows what literary nonfiction―and what books―can yet do and be. I already consider her to be one of America's most important and influential writers." - Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
"Gorgeously written, intimate and wise, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House is an astonishing memoir of family, love, and survival. It's also a history of New Orleans unlike any we've seen before, one that should be required reading." - Jami Attenberg, author of All Grown Up
"From a singular writer, a crucial memoir of life on the margins―one that, through ruthless observation and deepest intelligence, might help reintegrate what happens in those margins into the central narratives of American life...Timeless in its telling, The Yellow House could become a modern classic." - Whiting Nonfiction Grant Jury
This information about The Yellow House was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah M. Broom is a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine among others. A native New Orleanian, she received her Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York state.
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