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The Yellow House

About the Book

The Yellow House

A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.

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 12 children. But, after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s 13th 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.

The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom

  • Publication Date: June 30, 2020
  • Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Grove Press
  • ISBN-10: 0802149030
  • ISBN-13: 9780802149039