The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
7f-b599-55b8-858e-816aa54d2f01">
“Broom knits together her family history, the history of New Orleans East, and the history of her family’s house to tell a grand story of the fallacy behind the myth of New Orleans, the aftereffects of Katrina, and the transformation of a city into something not quite what its inhabitants have made.”
—Kaitlyn Greenidge, The Cut
“[An] extraordinary, engrossing debut … 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
“Broom’s memoir of poverty, striving, and justice in pre- and post-Katrina-stricken New Orleans concerns rising tides, the literal ones that took her childhood home, and the structural ones, too, that, instead of lifting all, are threatening to drown. Broom has a reporter’s eye but an essayist’s heart, blending urban history of her segregated home city and her family’s attempt to survive in it.”
—Vogue
“NOLA Darling, Sarah M. Broom’s obsession with her childhood home in New Orleans is the focal point of her intimate nonfiction debut … This brave work delves into such issues as poor housing, subpar health care, family bonds, personal erasure and survival.”
—Essence
“Thoughtful, nuanced … While Katrina is the cataclysmic event that centers Broom’s story, The Yellow House isn’t really about the storm. It’s about the devastating, generational effects of social, economic and political disparity across racial lines, and how people with few resources are decimated by disaster … Broom has done an astonishing job.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“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
“Broom … has some of David Simon’s effortless reporting style, and her meditations on eroding places recall Jeannette Walls … A touching tribute to family and a unique exploration of the American experience.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[A] powerful tale of home, family, inequality, displacement, and love, and Broom tells it with strength, lucidity, and grace.”
—Nylon
“Evocative and startling … A story of nest and adventure, of home and away, of where you come from and what you’re headed to, and how it makes you who you are … an arresting narrative on its way to becoming a classic.”
—Bridgett M. Davis, Women’s Review of Books
“A moving tribute to family and a powerful indictment of societal indifference.”
—Booklist
“A heartfelt but unflinching recovery project … Broom’s lyrical style celebrates her family bonds, but a righteous fury runs throughout the narrative at New Orleans’ injustices, from the foundation on up. A tribute to the multitude of stories one small home can contain, even one bursting with loss.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Inspired by a favorite James Baldwin line—‘I decided to return here because I was afraid to’—Broom’s first book mines her family’s relationship to the city, and the house, a place her body can never revisit but where her mind wanders still.”
—Garden & Gun
“Broom delivers, writing about New Orleans absent any mysticism or gumbo-stained sentimentality.” —Jezebel
“Sarah Broom’s sweeping memoir is epic in scope—a love letter to the family of twelve of which she is the ‘babiest,’ an intimate and uncompromising vision of the New Orleans that shaped her, an homage to deep roots and to blackness—all of this shot through with reverence, longing and abiding love.”
—Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
“Broom’s extraordinary debut is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination and poor city planning that led her family’s New Orleans home to be wiped off the map.”
—New York Times Editors’ Choice
“Broom has effectively told the story of black America in one fell swoop … [The Yellow House] is a mythic rendering of the cost and brilliant tenacity of the American black family’s struggle to confront, wrestle with and resist destruction in ‘the mouth of this dragon we call america,’ as writer Audre Lorde says.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The Yellow House is a masterpiece of history, politics, sociology, and memory. Actually, it’s just a masterpiece, period.”
—Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
“Broom’s prose flows so easily it’s almost meditative … as much as this book is about Broom’s family, it is also about New Orleans East—its history and culture, its racial tensions, its devastating destruction, and the resounding effects of its abandonment post-Katrina.”
—BuzzFeed
“The Yellow House is a book with numerous, interwoven themes: motherhood, racial identity, the establishment and destruction of place, and the interconnection of stories among ancestral voices.”
—Rumpus
“From its metaphoric title … to its heartbreaking last pages, Broom illustrates how she and her family remain emotionally tied to the ground where the house once stood, guardians of its memories.”
—National Book Review
“Stunning … [a] powerhouse narrative … Broom employs years of interviews … as well as scholarly research to broaden the lens as wide as humanly possible on what could be known about the people and the circumstances that led to the New Orleans of her upbringing.”
—Veronica Chambers, Shondaland
“Sarah Broom’s book is an extraordinary example of how language can make things. Her words, sentences, thoughts as she creates New Orleans East—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 File
THE YELLOW HOUSE
Sarah M. Broom
Copyright © 2019 by Sarah M. Broom
Map © Martin Lubikowski, ML Design, London
Cover artwork © Alison Forner
Logo from The New York Times, © 2019 The New York Times Company.
All rights reserved. Used under license.
Kei Miller, excerpt from The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet Press Ltd); Peter Turchi, excerpt from Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Trinity University