The Yellow House: A Memoir
by Sarah M. Broom
On This Page
Description
"Sarah M. Broom's [memoir] 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."--Tags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
As many others have said before me, The Yellow House is a stunning, multi-layered family history and memoir. Sarah Broom grew up, for lack of a better term, living a dual existence. As the youngest of a large family whose oldest siblings are decades older than her, she is both the cherished youngest sister and youngest daughter, but also the one who does not directly share many family experiences with the oldest of her eleven siblings, often being told about events that occurred "before," meaning before she was born or of age to take part or remember. Only six months old when her father dies, she is the only of the twelve siblings to grow up fatherless. Named Monique at birth, Moore, at her mother's prompting, begin going by Sarah when show more she enters school, her mother believing this more neutral name will make teachers and even classmates take her more seriously. As time goes by, only her family members continue to call her Monique, or, more commonly, Mo. In an important way, the whole family is one of outsiders, for they live in the New Orleans East neighborhood, a failed urban project, built on paved over meadows and swampland, at onetime promised to create a working-class neighborhood of dreams, but abandoned 20 years later as hopeless, morphing from middle-class white to hard scrapple black, with houses replaced by junkyards and tire factories, a place where bodies are dumped and where policeman park at night to get oral sex in their cars from hookers. Most maps of the town do not even include New Orleans East at all. {A note that I lived in New Orleans for seven years, and in a relatively nearby neighborhood, Gentilly, but I don't think I once set foot in New Orleans East.} The area is a toxic outlier, outside the margins of what New Orleanians, and all tourists, think of the parameters of their city. And finally there is Hurricane Katrina, which turns the whole of New Orleans into a city of outsiders, with huge swaths of the the population forced to emigrate, their neighborhoods and houses gone, many never to return. Some may remember the time right after the storm when there was a serious conversation throughout the country as to whether New Orleans was worth rebuilding at all. Sarah, a college graduate, a writer, leaves for New York to live in Harlem. But the city, and especially her family's stories continually pull her back.
The book's heroine is Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, high of personal standards and a steady and loving presence for her children. The centerpiece of Broom's story is the yellow house of the title, Ivory Mae's dream of independence and well-being, shoddily built at the outset and continually undermined by half-finished repair and renovation projects undertaken by never completed by various family members and friends that leave floors incomplete and unsteady, doors and windows sitting improperly in their frames, and plumbing jury-rigged. Yet it is the family's home and center, and the place where Broom lives the entirety of her childhood and adolescence.
For the purposes of this memoir, Moore conducted many interviews with family members, and delved into newspaper and government records to recreate not only the lives of her parents and siblings, but also the lives of the generations before them. Many of these stories are, of course, in the nature of oral history, their details at the mercy of the tellers' memories, and Broom presents them as such, though sometimes augmented from fragments she's been able to find through city records. Then there is the anguish of Katrina, referred to almost exclusively in The Yellow House simply as Water, is described in deeply affecting yet matter of fact terms: The danger of the storm itself, as her brother and a friend sit on their roofs, with the floods almost up to where they perch, for a week, waiting for rescue. The ruination of their delapitated yet beloved family home and its callous demolition by the city, with nary a warning sent, some time afterward. The family's scattering, with some siblings ending up as far away as California and Arizona. Ivory Mae's years-long wait for promised government grant money so the family house can be rebuilt.
And through all this we experience Sarah's search for herself, for her own place within the family, for a deeper understanding of her place as a New Orleanian, if indeed such a place exists for her. This is a compelling, multi-layered, extremely well written memoir full of compassion and love and frustration and tragedy, all seamlessly held together by Broom's sense of narrative and talents of description. Here's just one example of Brooms writing:
"Grandmother was the kind of woman Eddie admired, hardworking and concerned with having nice things. She had two cars parked in the garage of her house on Mockingbird Lane even though she could not drive (cars for people to drive her around in). She was contained but occasionally mercurial. She could go off on you in a spoilt second. When the presentation of the body stands in for all the qualities the world claims you cannot possess, some people call you elegant. Grandmother was that, yes, but sometimes elegance is just willpower and grace, a way to keep the flailing parts of the self together." show less
The book's heroine is Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, high of personal standards and a steady and loving presence for her children. The centerpiece of Broom's story is the yellow house of the title, Ivory Mae's dream of independence and well-being, shoddily built at the outset and continually undermined by half-finished repair and renovation projects undertaken by never completed by various family members and friends that leave floors incomplete and unsteady, doors and windows sitting improperly in their frames, and plumbing jury-rigged. Yet it is the family's home and center, and the place where Broom lives the entirety of her childhood and adolescence.
For the purposes of this memoir, Moore conducted many interviews with family members, and delved into newspaper and government records to recreate not only the lives of her parents and siblings, but also the lives of the generations before them. Many of these stories are, of course, in the nature of oral history, their details at the mercy of the tellers' memories, and Broom presents them as such, though sometimes augmented from fragments she's been able to find through city records. Then there is the anguish of Katrina, referred to almost exclusively in The Yellow House simply as Water, is described in deeply affecting yet matter of fact terms: The danger of the storm itself, as her brother and a friend sit on their roofs, with the floods almost up to where they perch, for a week, waiting for rescue. The ruination of their delapitated yet beloved family home and its callous demolition by the city, with nary a warning sent, some time afterward. The family's scattering, with some siblings ending up as far away as California and Arizona. Ivory Mae's years-long wait for promised government grant money so the family house can be rebuilt.
And through all this we experience Sarah's search for herself, for her own place within the family, for a deeper understanding of her place as a New Orleanian, if indeed such a place exists for her. This is a compelling, multi-layered, extremely well written memoir full of compassion and love and frustration and tragedy, all seamlessly held together by Broom's sense of narrative and talents of description. Here's just one example of Brooms writing:
"Grandmother was the kind of woman Eddie admired, hardworking and concerned with having nice things. She had two cars parked in the garage of her house on Mockingbird Lane even though she could not drive (cars for people to drive her around in). She was contained but occasionally mercurial. She could go off on you in a spoilt second. When the presentation of the body stands in for all the qualities the world claims you cannot possess, some people call you elegant. Grandmother was that, yes, but sometimes elegance is just willpower and grace, a way to keep the flailing parts of the self together." show less
This memoir of the eleventh child in a black family in a forgotten area of New Orleans taught me a lot about the city, the storm, and most important about people. It gives clear and individual voices to a large, poor, black family, underlining the fact that generalizations about groups of people are often (if not usually) wrong. The characters emerge vividly, and are inextricably tied to a city and to a house. The writing about the storm and its aftermath is gripping and profound. Well worth reading.
Sarah Broom grew up in New Orleans, the youngest of twelve children. She never knew her father Simon, who died six months after Sarah was born. The family lived in New Orleans East, on a short street sandwiched between a busy highway and railroad tracks. While they were far from financially secure, they were close-knit. Sarah’s mother Ivory moved heaven and earth to provide for her children, and as the children grew into adults they looked after one another, too. Their home, the Yellow House, was lovingly cared for by Ivory, but it was also riddled with structural issues due to its age, construction, and attempts at remodeling to meet the needs of a growing family.
Everything changed when Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city in show more 2005. By that time, Sarah was twenty-five and living in New York, but most of her family was still in New Orleans. Several family members evacuated to California and Texas. One brother rode out the storm and found himself living on a rooftop for a week before being rescued, The Yellow House did not survive the storm. Not surprisingly, the scope of the tragedy and her family’s long-term displacement took its toll on Sarah.
Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?
Growing up, the Yellow House had been a source of embarrassment. Sarah and her siblings were actively discouraged from inviting friends to visit; on the rare occasions this occurred, it did not go well. But even as Sarah forged an identity that could never reveal where she lived, the house was still home, a foundation holding up every member of the family. With its loss, Sarah also lost the structural foundation in her life. The Yellow House is the product of Sarah’s efforts to reconstruct her family history, much of which she had not been aware of, to understand the ways in which Katrina impacted each person, and to determine what this all means for her life moving forward. show less
Everything changed when Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city in show more 2005. By that time, Sarah was twenty-five and living in New York, but most of her family was still in New Orleans. Several family members evacuated to California and Texas. One brother rode out the storm and found himself living on a rooftop for a week before being rescued, The Yellow House did not survive the storm. Not surprisingly, the scope of the tragedy and her family’s long-term displacement took its toll on Sarah.
Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?
Growing up, the Yellow House had been a source of embarrassment. Sarah and her siblings were actively discouraged from inviting friends to visit; on the rare occasions this occurred, it did not go well. But even as Sarah forged an identity that could never reveal where she lived, the house was still home, a foundation holding up every member of the family. With its loss, Sarah also lost the structural foundation in her life. The Yellow House is the product of Sarah’s efforts to reconstruct her family history, much of which she had not been aware of, to understand the ways in which Katrina impacted each person, and to determine what this all means for her life moving forward. show less
The author of this one is the youngest in a family of eleven children and grew up in a little-known part of New Orleans that has been ignored by both city planners and tourists almost since its founding. The place was pretty desolate: in the shadow of a nearby highway, it featured worse-than-mediocre schools and a frightening amount of street crime. The house from which the book takes its name was also a pretty precarious affair, a structure than housed a whole lot of people that seemed to start sinking into the Louisiana swamp just about as soon as it was built. As tourism exploded in the French Quarter, the author's neighborhood slowly turned into an industrial nowhere, and that was before Katrina hit. This is a book about surviving show more in the face of long odds. The house referred to in the title is both a home in the conventional sense -- the author expresses real affection for it -- and an object lesson about how to carve out your own space in a time and place that seem to be less and less concerned about the survival of the people in it. I've said this about a lot of midlife memoirs, but it's a small wonder that this book exists, but I'm glad that it does.
The author also proves that she's a pretty able historical researcher, talking us through the history of her family from plantation times onward, picking up what she can about the sort of people whose forgetting sometimes seems inevitable. From one perspective, the book's central mystery might be Broom's own father, Simon Broom, who died suddenly when the author was just six months old. Living, as I do, in a era of media oversaturation, I was surprised that the author was able to locate only six photographs of her father. Both the reader and the author mostly meet him through others' stories. Whether the author's digging through country records, talking to members of the jazz band he used to play in, or describing how New Orleans' development has consistently short-changed most of its own residents, you get a sense of how consistently precarious her family's existence has been. The author was actually working for a magazine in New York City when Katrina hit, but, fittingly enough, she spends a bit of time in Burundi, a place where the coming apocalypse is taken for granted. At the end of the book, the author's big family is dispersed, and the New Orleans she once knew is being increasingly overshadowed by the tourist attractions that have made the city famous, but everyone is still, more or less, still on their feet. And now the baby of the family's gone and written a book that won the National Book Award, and, what's more, absolutely deserves it. This long, complex, and occasionally meandering story is inspiring in more ways than one. In rescuing what was almost certain to be erased by time, this book does one of the things that all good writing is supposed to do. "The Yellow House" is well worth your time. show less
The author also proves that she's a pretty able historical researcher, talking us through the history of her family from plantation times onward, picking up what she can about the sort of people whose forgetting sometimes seems inevitable. From one perspective, the book's central mystery might be Broom's own father, Simon Broom, who died suddenly when the author was just six months old. Living, as I do, in a era of media oversaturation, I was surprised that the author was able to locate only six photographs of her father. Both the reader and the author mostly meet him through others' stories. Whether the author's digging through country records, talking to members of the jazz band he used to play in, or describing how New Orleans' development has consistently short-changed most of its own residents, you get a sense of how consistently precarious her family's existence has been. The author was actually working for a magazine in New York City when Katrina hit, but, fittingly enough, she spends a bit of time in Burundi, a place where the coming apocalypse is taken for granted. At the end of the book, the author's big family is dispersed, and the New Orleans she once knew is being increasingly overshadowed by the tourist attractions that have made the city famous, but everyone is still, more or less, still on their feet. And now the baby of the family's gone and written a book that won the National Book Award, and, what's more, absolutely deserves it. This long, complex, and occasionally meandering story is inspiring in more ways than one. In rescuing what was almost certain to be erased by time, this book does one of the things that all good writing is supposed to do. "The Yellow House" is well worth your time. show less
A before and after memoir of a large family displaced from their home in East New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. As the name suggests, this area bounded by waterways (the Industrial Canal, the Intracoastal Waterway and Lake Pontchartrain) lies east of the old City of New Orleans, its downtown, its Garden District, its French Quarter; claimed from swamp and marshland to be a "suburb within the city", planned developments and apartment complexes proliferated until the oil bust brought it all to a halt, leaving proposed projects half-built, with highway interchanges that led nowhere and a dwindling, increasingly poorer population. As a young widow, the author's mother, Ivory Mae Webb, bought the yellow house with insurance money; she show more eventually raised 12 children there. By the time Sarah was born nearly 20 years later, the house had been subject to time, weather, poverty, subsidence, neglect, remodeling projects that were never quite finished, haphazard repairs, shoddy wiring, failing plumbing and the "shifty settling in of shame". Later, Sarah's mother would discourage the children from bringing friends home, because "this house not all that comfortable for other people". But it was Home, it was filled with love, with homemade curtains and birthday cakes, with pictures taken to commemorate special occasions like graduations and weddings, with Ivory Mae's determination to keep things as decent as possible. It was New Orleans to residents of the neighborhood; when Sarah took an apartment in the French Quarter, her mother came to visit---as a tourist in her home town. Even after Hurricane Katrina inundated the neighborhood and blew the house apart, Sarah and some of her siblings remained drawn to the derelict yellow house, and later to the vacant lot where it had once stood, keeping the grass cut and trash off the lot, even though it would never be "home" to any of them again. This is a powerful, challenging book. I found the first several chapters of family history interesting, but not quite fully engaging. However, once the author began telling stories of the times she remembered herself, the pages flew. Highly recommended. show less
This book, ostensibly about the author’s home in New Orleans, is really about identifying the definition of home for every person. She lived all over the world, but Broom kept returning to New Orleans, to a section of the city that was so forgotten, it was often ignored on maps. And then when the “Water” came, Katrina, it was the final insult as the neighborhood and the beloved house was destroyed. I really enjoyed the writing of the book, but I felt the story was more a Broom family record, often with tedious detail. The National Book Award testifies to its worth, however. Broom will, not doubt be heard from for many years.
"During the Tennessee Williams Festival Screaming Contest, when Stanleys compete to yell "Stella!" the best, the winner that year yelled "FEMA!" instead."
As the youngest of twelve children brought up in the desolate (even pre-Katrina) New Orleans East, the author brings us alongside, to live in the tumbledown house she thrived in and suffered through. The reader actually LEARNS Sarah, her mother Ivory Mae, her grandmother Rose, her brothers, her doomed childhood friend Alvin, the isolation of their neighborhood, and the family's shame of place and pride of blood. Sarah escapes to college in Texas, skitters across the world, to Harlem, Burundi, the French Quarter, Oprah Magazine, but never manages to shake her allegiance to her ravaged show more city and to that damned house.
Quotes: "We were composed children. We walked upright, possibly with airs, expecting great things of ourselves and everyone around us. Like her mother, my mother buried her rage and despair deep within, under layers and layers of poise."
"It is a terrible thing to see love misfire into a million different directions."
"Remembering is a chair that is hard to sit on."
"It is hard to talk about returning to a place you have not psychically left." show less
As the youngest of twelve children brought up in the desolate (even pre-Katrina) New Orleans East, the author brings us alongside, to live in the tumbledown house she thrived in and suffered through. The reader actually LEARNS Sarah, her mother Ivory Mae, her grandmother Rose, her brothers, her doomed childhood friend Alvin, the isolation of their neighborhood, and the family's shame of place and pride of blood. Sarah escapes to college in Texas, skitters across the world, to Harlem, Burundi, the French Quarter, Oprah Magazine, but never manages to shake her allegiance to her ravaged show more city and to that damned house.
Quotes: "We were composed children. We walked upright, possibly with airs, expecting great things of ourselves and everyone around us. Like her mother, my mother buried her rage and despair deep within, under layers and layers of poise."
"It is a terrible thing to see love misfire into a million different directions."
"Remembering is a chair that is hard to sit on."
"It is hard to talk about returning to a place you have not psychically left." show less
Members
- Recently Added By
Published Reviews
ThingScore 100
For the author Sarah M Broom, home was once New Orleans East where her widowed mother, Ivory Mae, bought a house in 1961 with her late husband's life insurance. Broom’s award-winning debut, The Yellow House (Corsair), is a history of a house, a family and a neighbourhood brought low by neglect, racism and inequality. The youngest of 12 children, she had moved away from the city by the time show more Hurricane Katrina hit, but she paints a harrowing picture assembled from the memories of her family. Their heartbreak is compounded by the city’s treatment of its residents: Mae's house was eventually demolished without her knowledge, the notification letter having been sent to the abandoned property. show less
added by Cynfelyn
The Yellow House has garnered well-deserved praise; it won a National Book Award and appeared on several "best of the year" lists. More than just a narrative about a family, it is a masterpiece of personal and social history, examining the devastating consequences of decades of government neglect and revealing the very weak foundations on which the American dream rests. Using oral history, show more forgotten pieces of journalism, photographs, deeds, and other artifacts, The Yellow House helps to fill in those painful "silent leaps," as Broom puts it, that fragment the history of her family and her home of New Orleans East.
By giving her family members space to tell their stories, Broom does far more than help knit this history back together. Like Hartman*, she also poses a set of vexing questions: How do you reconstruct the history of a place and a people whose importance has been deemed negligible (at best) by those in power? How do you use the archives to write the narrative of a life (or in this case, lives) without replicating the initial violence?
*Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in two acts". show less
By giving her family members space to tell their stories, Broom does far more than help knit this history back together. Like Hartman*, she also poses a set of vexing questions: How do you reconstruct the history of a place and a people whose importance has been deemed negligible (at best) by those in power? How do you use the archives to write the narrative of a life (or in this case, lives) without replicating the initial violence?
*Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in two acts". show less
added by Cynfelyn
Sarah M. Broom is a writer of great intellect and breadth. She embraces momentous subjects. The Yellow House is about the relentless divestment of wealth from the African American family no matter how hard its members work; and our government's failure to protect its poor from predictable environmental catastrophe and subsequent trauma; and our gross neglect of poor neighborhoods; and sham show more promises that never materialize or are broken too easily, and the papering over of deep systemic problems by politicians and we the people. show less
added by Cynfelyn
Lists
Must-Read Books by Black Authors
114 works; 90 members
Top Five Books of 2020
982 works; 348 members
Books recommended by Barack Obama
295 works; 28 members
2020 Notable Books for Adults
26 works; 5 members
The Guardian Books of the Year 2020
126 works; 8 members
BLM
210 works; 1 member
Which house?
423 works; 16 members
Club Read's Recommended Nonfiction Written by Women
618 works; 30 members
Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2019
19 works; 3 members
Books We Discovered On LibraryThing
530 works; 130 members
Author Information
1+ Work 1,318 Members
Sarah M. Broom 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 show more Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York state. show less
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Observer Book of the Week (2020-07-26)
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Yellow House: A Memoir
- Original publication date
- 2019-08-14
- People/Characters
- Ivory Mae Webb; Sarah M. Broom (b. 1979); Simon Broom (d. 1980)
- Important places
- New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
- Important events
- Hurricane Betsy (1965); Hurricane Katrina (2005)
- Epigraph
- draw me a map of what you see
then I will draw a map of what you never see
and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose?
-----------Kei Miller
To learn how to read any map is to be indoctrinated
into that mapmaker's culture.
----Peter Turchi - Dedication
- for three women, with love and heart
- First words
- From high up, fifteen thousand feet above, where the aerial photographs are taken, 4121 Wilson Avenue, the address I know best, is a minuscule point, a scab of green.
- Quotations
- Remembering is a chair that is hard to sit still in. p223
You, kitchen, do not warm me. You, living room, do not comfort me. You, bedroom, do not keep me. p161
When I look at you all, I don't really see the house, but I see what happened from the house. And so in that way, the house can't die. p192 - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The story of our house was the only thing left.
- Blurbers
- Wideman, John Edgar; Mathis, Ayana; Julavits, Heidi; Laymon, Kiese; Flournoy, Angela; Attenberg, Jami (show all 11); George, Lynell; Garner, Dwight; Corrigan, Maureen; Dvorak, Petula; Taddeo, Lisa
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 814.6
- Canonical LCC
- PS3602.R6458
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 1,318
- Popularity
- 18,165
- Reviews
- 48
- Rating
- (3.90)
- Languages
- English, German
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
- ASINs
- 5