The Yellow House

Sarah M. Broom is a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine among others. A native New Orleanian, she 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 Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York state.

THE AWARD-WINNING BESTSELLER 'Gorgeously written, intimate and wise . . . an astonishing memoir of family, love, and survival' Jami Attenberg, author of All Grown UpIn 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighbourhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. The Yellow House tells a hundred years of Sarah M. Broom's family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologised 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 is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalised shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority and power.'An extraordinary, engrossing debut' Angela Flournoy, New York Times Book Review'Pared down to its studs The Yellow House is a love story. It is a declaration of unconditional devotion and commitment to place' Lynell George, Los Angeles Times'[This] gorgeous debut, The Yellow House, reads as elegy and prayer' Maureen Corrigan, NPR 'Masterful' Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women