Description

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

‘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.

Publisher Review

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 -- Angela Flournoy * New York Times Book Review * A brilliant account of life before and after Hurricane Katrina . . .What unfolds is a fiercely resonant account of living somewhere ignored, unloved and in decline, but also the endless fight to survive it . . . In precise, dovetail-jointed sentences Broom writes beautifully about interior spaces of all kinds. The house comes alive, but so too, for example, does the psychology behind her grandmother's impeccable appearance . . . Monumental * Victoria Segal, The Sunday Times * Since, as the author writes, "it's hard to know what you cannot see", this book will also help you know a great many things much better. More marvellous than that, these pages might inspire you to sit with your mother, your grandmothers - to ride out to the cemetery and check your dead friend's plot - to gather with your siblings for an evening on the stone slab where once your childhood home stood. With The Yellow House, Sarah Broom has shown us a way to go back home, perhaps to heal * Casey Gerald, Observer Book of the Week * This is a major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade * New York Times * Part oral history, part urban investigation, The Yellow House goes beyond the perimeters of memoir: it is an exposition of the fault lines under the American dream. Katrina may have felled the Yellow House, but it was built on rotten foundations. * Mia Levitin, The Spectator * Masterful. Large-scale and granular at once. Quietly stunning prose. Wow. Sarah M. Broom's gorgeous debut, The Yellow House, reads as elegy and prayer . . . Broom is a writer of great intellect and breadth * NPR * 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 The Yellow House is both personal and sharply political . . . Readers may hear echoes of James Baldwin in the relentlessness of her inquiry, and in the sinewy cadences of her sentences . . . Pared down to its studs, The Yellow House is a love story. It is a declaration of unconditional devotion and commitment to place. * Los Angeles Times * A beautiful memoir . . . rich and complex * Guardian 'Books of the Year' * Every few years, a book comes along that teaches readers of memoir how to read and writers of memoir how to write. Calling Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House a memoir feels wrong . . . 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 A great, multigenerational family story . . . Broom is an engaging guide; she has some of David Simon's effortless reporting style, and her meditations on eroding places recall Jeannette Walls. The house didn't survive Katrina, but its destruction strengthened Broom's appreciation of home. Broom's memoir serves as a touching tribute to family and a unique exploration of the American experience * Publishers Weekly *