ONLINE - Book Discussion: The Yellow House by Sarah Broom

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant. 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 is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows.

The Nonfictioneers book discussion group meets on the first Tuesday of the month via Zoom (while the Library is doing online programs only) to discuss classic and contemporary non-fiction titles.

Click here to see a full list of titles to be discussed in 2021. Please register below to receive the Zoom link.