4/5 stars
What's it about? Sarah M. Broom unpacks her family’s history, her upbringing as the youngest of twelve children, and the social, cultural, and political realities of her native New Orleans East before and after Hurricane Katrina. A thoughtful accounting of homecoming and place.
How’d I find it? My spouse’s family has links to New Orleans and collected multiple copies of The Yellow House over the years.
Who will enjoy this book? This is a must-read for memoir lovers, especially because Broom manages to craft an intimate look at her family while remaining at a remove herself, a technique that serves her complex narrative well. The book evokes home in a way that reminded me of The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez.
What stood out? The first section of the book (“Movement I: The World Before Me”) draws the reader into its beautifully rendered portrait of heritage, gleaming with the author’s admiration for her family’s matriarchs. The Brooms and their wavelets of friends and ancestors comprise The Yellow House’s irreducible core, and you’ll yearn to return to them when the author focuses her attention elsewhere — another smart tool to reinforce periods of displacement. Despite some detours into platitudes (“namelessness is a form of naming”), Broom knows how to command the page.
Which line made me feel something? “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.”