The Yellow House

The Yellow House is a memoir by Sarah M. Broom about her family, their home and their city. The youngest of twelve children, Broom grew up in a shotgun house in New Orleans East, a part of the city far from the French Quarter and largely ignored by visitors and officials alike. Her mother bought the house as a young widow in 1961, and over the decades it became the center of the family's life, even as it slowly fell into disrepair. When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the house was destroyed and the family was scattered. Weaving together a century of family history, her own path away from home and back again, and the neglect of the neighborhood, Broom examines how place, class and race shape belonging. It won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction.