num_pages: 376
description: 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.
language: English
title: The Yellow House
publisher: Grove Press