After finishing The Yellow House, the debut memoir from Sarah M. Broom, there was a deep-seated feeling of dread that fell over me. Not because I didn’t want the story to end or because I had to collect my thoughts about it and write a review (maybe a little bit), but it’s because I don’t think many books will live up to the bar it has now set. Calling The Yellow House a memoir would be doing it a disservice. It’s richer, more inquisitive than anything I’ve read in a long time. Even with it bringing home the National Book Award for Nonfiction and being named in The New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post’s top 10 books of the year in 2019, Broom’s debut should live far beyond its spotlight.
No synopsis for The Yellow House feels adequate. Throughout the 372-page, or 14-hour and 19-minute audiobook, Broom dons many different hats and shifts through various periods and genres. She is the reporter who scours the archives for pieces of evidence that paint the picture of her family and how they came to live in her childhood home, The Yellow House, on the short end of Wilson Street in New Orleans East, what Broom calls “the world before me.” When she formally introduces herself into the story on page 101, she’s the youngest child of 12 and experiences moments any child might remember: developing crushes at school, finally getting prescription glasses, and losing elder family members. She experiences not-so-common things such as Darryl, who was her older brother but also a stranger, hiding under her bed waiting to steal something from The Yellow House to pawn for drugs. Broom’s series of vignettes culminate in her leaving for college, away from her mother Ivory Mae and the “thirteenth and most unruly child,” The Yellow House. As she moves through college and into working at magazines and with an independent radio station in the east African country of Burundi, Broom is almost like a philosopher who is trying to make sense of everything. After Hurricane Katrina damaged 70% of New Orleans’ occupied housing in August of 2005, Broom was left in a world of displacement and frustration. Her investigations into the mythology of New Orleans, her family, and everything in between make up a comprehensive picture of her known world.
That world is depicted through Broom’s astute abilities as a reporter. She has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and bylines in the New Yorker, New York Times, Oxford Magazine, and O Magazine, among others. This experience, both academically and in the field, is apparent when she pulls from obituaries in multi-decade old editions of The Times-Picayune or surveys library records and poses questions to a worker at the New Orleans City Planning Department. Most of all, her background and experience come on display in her conversations and interviews with siblings and family friends, which shape much of The Yellow House. Her thoughtful inquiries and observations — she wrote down everything in a notebook as a child and always has her red recorder on in her later years — add every depth imaginable to the story. The mother-daughter relationship is the glue that holds the comedic, dramatic, and gut-wrenching sensibilities of the book together. The interviews and moments in action that Broom catches of her mother make the journey worthwhile:
“When you told Dad you were pregnant again, did he say something?”
No.
“What did he say?”
Nothing.
“Not a single word?”
Here we go again!
You were born in seventy-niyen. They saw you were in distress. All them children I had, ain’t none of them ever been in no distress. And you been in it ever since.
At its core, The Yellow House is a story of loss, identity, inequality and shame. Its tenets are built up through Broom’s expertly crafted structure, observations, interviews and overall thoughtfulness, converging to make something much bigger than a memoir. Hopefully, this entry into her bibliography is just the first of many.
Andrew Walsh 