• The Yellow House is a nonfiction memoir published in 2019 by the American author Sarah M. In a narrative centered around her childhood home, “The Yellow House,” Broom chronicles the history of New Orleans through three generations of her family. The Yellow House won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the National Book.
• A new yellow house. The Yellow House was knocked sideways by Katrina, torn down by bureaucracy. “When it fell down, something in me burst,” she writes. Recently, Broom bought a home in New.
• THE YELLOW HOUSE Links AUTHOR: Sarah M. Broom: Author's Website Author's Interview Author on Wikipedia: REVIEWS: The Yellow House: Kirkus The NY Times Book Companion WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION. A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family.

• The Yellow House Sarah Broom
• The Yellow House Sarah Broom Reviews
• The Yellow House Sarah Broom Discussion Questions

“When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.” ― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House.

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The Yellow House: A Memoir (2019 National Book Award Winner) By Sarah M. Broom

Summary

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

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 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. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.

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If you hope to immerse yourself in our one-hour conversation with Sarah Broom but only have a moment to spare, please sample the first two minutes.

Ode to Ivory Mae

During those first two minutes with Sarah Broom, winner of the 2019 National Book Award for her memoir, The Yellow House – before we even get to our conversation – you will hear an ode to her mother, Ivory Mae, that will take your breath away.

The Yellow House Sarah Broom

And if that Ode to Ivory Mae makes you want to know more about what exactly she did with Sarah, the youngest of 12 children, to create Sarah’s unusual gift for the written – and spoken – word-- then take just another minute to listen to the following short exchange.

The Yellow House Sarah Broom Reviews

Reading Proverbs Out Loud(77 seconds)

And then, to understand more about Sarah Broom’s obsessive attention to detail and her ability to identify the most memorable, granular details from her subjects, spend a minute watching the following excerpt on how, as a child, Sarah came to be known as “The Recorder.”

“The Recorder” (48 seconds)

And then – well by then – you might as well accept that watching our full conversation with Sarah Broom may be a better way to spend the next hour than whatever you had been planning to do before.

The Yellow House Sarah Broom Discussion Questions

We hope you enjoy our conversation with an author who, with the help of multiple generations of her family, has put a neglected area, of a legendary American city, on the map.

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