The Yellow House The Yellow House

The Yellow House

A Memoir (2019 National Book Award Winner)

    • 4.1 • 208 Ratings
    • $9.99
    • $9.99

Publisher Description

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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.

GENRE
Biographies & Memoirs
RELEASED
2019
August 13
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
304
Pages
PUBLISHER
Grove Atlantic
SELLER
Perseus Books, LLC
SIZE
14.4
MB

More Books Like This

Manhattan, When I Was Young Manhattan, When I Was Young
1995
Low Country Low Country
2021
Screening Room Screening Room
2015
The Hue and Cry at Our House The Hue and Cry at Our House
2017
The Barefoot Bingo Caller The Barefoot Bingo Caller
2017
I Drink Coffee and Make Shit Up I Drink Coffee and Make Shit Up
2022

More Books by Sarah M. Broom

Customers Also Bought

Homeland Elegies Homeland Elegies
2020
Disappearing Earth Disappearing Earth
2019
The Topeka School The Topeka School
2019
Trust Exercise Trust Exercise
2019
Memorial Drive Memorial Drive
2020
The Night Watchman The Night Watchman
2020