Sarah M. Broom

Sarah M. Broom is a memoirist and journalist whose writing joins family history, oral testimony, reportage, and close attention to place. The Yellow House traces roughly a century of her family’s life through the New Orleans East house that her mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961. Broom follows a household of twelve children, the neighborhood’s uneven development, her father’s early death, and the house’s gradual decline before Hurricane Katrina removed it from the map. The memoir then widens its focus to displacement, public neglect, race, class, and the emotional difficulty of defining home after its physical center has vanished. Grove Press released the memoir in 2019, and it won that year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction. Broom grew up as the youngest child in the family she chronicles, giving the work an insider’s intimacy, but she also tests memory against interviews, records, and the altered cityscape. The result is both a family portrait and a history of a frequently overlooked part of New Orleans.