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The Yellow House by Sarah M Broom review – memoir as rich social history

This award-winning book tells the story of New Orleans through the attempt to resurrect a lost family home

S arah M Broom was once employed to tell the official story of New Orleans , of the city’s “unlikely recovery” after Hurricane Katrina, which struck on 29 August, 2005. She quit City Hall six months after she arrived and left New Orleans. “By leaving,” she writes, “I reclaimed my voice.” With that voice and with her book, The Yellow House , which won the 2019 US National Book award, she tells a far less romantic tale about this great American city. A far more honest and daring one, too.

Katrina claimed nearly 2,000 lives and ravaged many others, including that of Broom, whose childhood home, 4121 Wilson Avenue, was destroyed. The Yellow House makes plain the devastation, and the many causes, of that loss. Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, had purchased the home in 1961 with money from her dead husband’s life insurance policy. (He’d been run over just outside a Texas military base. Ivory Mae, then pregnant with their third child, would remarry and give birth to six more children, including Sarah, the last.) When she and her children moved in, Ivory Mae was the first in her immediate family to own a home. 4121 Wilson Avenue represented the American dream made real. As Broom traces the house’s history from 1961 to, and beyond, its destruction, she also traces, or reveals, the emptiness of that dream, an emptiness that many millions across America have also realised in the years since.

This is not, to be clear, literary disaster porn. The author has other plans: “to resurrect a house with words”. In so doing, she resurrects her city or, rather, presents it for the first time. Her New Orleans, New Orleans East, is not the New Orleans of your imagination, nor the imagination of cartographers (who often left the neighbourhood off city maps), nor even of historians, as “nothing had been written about the lives of the people who lived there.” New Orleans East is “a point beyond”. Broom takes us to the beyond, makes the beyond central.

A sad and vital fact: the author could not see clearly until she was 10 years old. Life, until then, had been a blur. According to Ivory Mae, the first thing Sarah says after seeing through her new glasses is: “Trees have leaves.” This delayed sight gives the young girl an unusual hunger to catch every detail, a hunger that stays with her, to our great benefit. I was reminded of the title of Gore Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest , as in a parchment that has been written over and erased many times, yet still leaves traces of past layers. Broom is meticulous in illuminating those layers: there are maps, official records, photographs; little histories of slave revolts, of French Quarter slave owners who were women of colour, of the Beatles’ first visit to town; histories of local government achievements, such as Nasa’s Saturn V rocket, built at the plant where her father, then brother, were employed; and histories of governmental failures, such as Hurricane Betsy, which hit in 1965. “The water had in fact swept in like a river,” she writes, “its course and fury made possible by many things, most of them manmade.” (One could write a similar sentence about many of the disasters, natural and otherwise, plaguing America today.) Most of all, we get an autopsic history of the Yellow House and the people who lived in it: birthdays, near-death accidents, light switches, curtains, possible sinkholes, persimmon trees, missing doorknobs, dress socks, etc, etc.

I must confess: early on during some of this detail, I jotted in the margins: “I personally really do not care about all this.” Should you feel the same, please continue. You will find, later, advice the author received from a French Quarter neighbour whose stories went on a little too long for Broom’s liking. “Jesus Christ, darling,” he would say. “Will you find some patience?” It is clear that the author found enough to write this important book. It is clear, also, that she rightfully demands the same of us. The Yellow House is a work that refuses to capitulate to your impatience – not out of an arrogant self-indulgence, but out of care. She seems to say: You will not get your entertainment at my people’s expense . This strikes me as rare, even brave. Many writers, or at least this writer, feel alienated from their family. But here is a writer who appears fully enmeshed in a family, in a clan, a system of interdependence and responsibility. One of the remarkable traits of The Yellow House , which makes it something larger than a personal narrative, is that the story is not fashioned from Broom’s voice alone. Her mother’s words are interspersed seamlessly with hers. The chapter on Hurricane Katrina calls to mind the work of Svetlana Alexievich , who crafts indispensable narratives of Soviet and post-Soviet life from witness testimonies. “Who has the rights to the story of a place?” Broom asks late in The Yellow House . The book answers: all of us.

That kind of communal intention, which flies in the face of the individualism of our society, takes work. Takes, at the very least, presence. The Yellow House , then, is also the story of Broom’s journey to accepting such a task. As early as her teens she is itching to leave home. She heads to Texas for college, California for graduate school, spends time in Istanbul, Berlin and Hong Kong, makes a home in Harlem and even, for over a year, lives in Burundi, where she helps raise money for a nonprofit organisation and feels a piercing loneliness. While there, a local woman tries to convince Broom that she is also Burundian, that she has simply forgotten her language. “‘That is all,’ the translator told me. ‘You have been gone too long.’” The author’s story is ultimately one of return. She goes back to New Orleans to relearn the language of her city, of her people. To craft a record of this home, this neighbourhood, these lives about which so many have said, or felt: “The subject… was not historical in nature”, as was written in the record of the Yellow House’s demolition.

Reading The Yellow House will not exactly resurrect 4121 Wilson Avenue. Nor will it repair what has been done to New Orleans and its inhabitants. It will, however, help you see a great many things more clearly. Since, as the author writes, “it’s hard to know what you cannot see”, this book will also help you know a great many things much better. More marvellous than that, these pages might inspire you to sit with your mother, your grandmothers – to ride out to the cemetery and check your dead friend’s plot – to gather with your siblings for an evening on the stone slab where once your childhood home stood. With The Yellow House , Sarah Broom has shown us a way to go back home, perhaps to heal. She has, I hope, fulfilled her “yearning for a leading role… in the story of New Orleans, which is to say, the story of America”.

Casey Gerald’s memoir There Will Be No Miracles Here is published by Serpent’s Tail (£9.99) The Yellow House by Sarah M Broom is published by Corsair (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com . Free UK p&p over £15

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The Yellow House

Sarah m. broom.

376 pages, Hardcover

First published August 13, 2019

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... much of what is great and praised about the city comes at the expense of its native black people, who are, more often than not, underemployed, underpaid, sometimes suffocated by the mythology that hides the city’s dysfunction and hopelessness.

Before the storm, New Orleans had the highest proportion of native-born residents of an American city—seventy-seven percent in 2000, which meant that only a small fraction of New Orleanians ever left for elsewhere. This was why the mass displacement meant so much.

Tongues was interiority writ large. You had to do it without shame, with no self-consciousness whatsoever. The only control was in letting go. Then you gave yourself over to it, it came bubbling out from you, this foreign language you did not need to study for, that was specific to your tongue, and that you did not know you spoke—until you did.

I describe this without irony and without sarcasm for I was one of the drunk. … When Pastor Frank came to you in line, energized and speaking in tongues, laughing and praying, you would almost immediately fall down …

By the start of 1997, I had sworn off church. They call it backsliding.

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A New Orleans family history: Big promises, dashed hopes and rising water

Petula Dvorak is a columnist at The Washington Post. She worked as a crime reporter at the Times-Picayune in the 1990s.

THE YELLOW HOUSE

By Sarah M. Broom

Grove. 376 pp. $26

There is a New Orleans without Mardi Gras beads, without gators or gumbo. It’s a place far from Bourbon Street and without a hint of voodoo.

It’s a place I knew well when I lived in the city. And that’s not a good thing. I was a crime reporter at the time, not a person you wanted in your neighborhood.

Sarah M. Broom’s stirring memoir, “The Yellow House,” is set in this New Orleans. It’s New Orleans East, a part of the city that tourists, poets and drawling Big Easy narratives don’t visit. It’s the place where the creators of the magic — cooks, bellhops, maintenance crews — live their lives.

Broom describes it on a bus ride home: “All of us who had traveled to the French Quarter for work from elsewhere wore the day’s labor on our bodies. We could place each other instantly by our uniforms: Napoleon House workers wore all black with white lettering on the breast pocket. . . . If you wore the grass-green outfit, the ugliest of them all, you worked at the Monteleone Hotel.”

The memoir is a delightful, deft, familiar — and ambitious — foray into family dynamics and working-class gusto, a relatable story of the townies in a city overrun by, and dependent upon, tourists.

The yellow house is the Broom family’s home in New Orleans East. It is their pride, hope and prison, guiding readers through the struggles of a black, working-class family. When Hurricane Katrina shatters their lives and scatters the family across the country, the book becomes far more urgent — and, I would argue, crucial. The yellow house is gutted by the issues confronting us today: pernicious racism, corporate greed, displacement and the improbable arithmetic of survival as a member of the working poor.

Broom is the youngest of a 12-child, blended family. Accordingly, she begins with her own archaeological expedition into all the funny and poignant family history she missed, being the “babiest”of the bunch. She is a griot telling the story of an American black family, embroidering the family tree with sharp reportage that explains nicknames, courtships, awkward studio portraits, family lore and the cruel everydayness of the era’s segregation.

Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, said she and her siblings were raised by a hard-working mother who tried to shield them from racism. “But Joseph, Elaine and Ivory had only to walk to the curb outside their Roman Street house to see Taylor Park and its sign: NO N-----S, NO CHINESE AND NO DOGS. It was a strange sight, the mostly empty, fenced-in park in a black neighborhood.”

The (not always yellow) house appears in the story after Ivory Mae loses her first husband, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking on the road outside Fort Hood, Tex., not long after he enlisted in the Army, a “black man run over while walking home, no explanation whatsoever, no fuss, no arrests,” Broom writes.

But the young father of two left a legacy: a life insurance policy. And that helped Ivory Mae buy the yellow house for $3,200 when she was just 19, becoming the first person in her immediate family to own a house. They were one of the only black families to move into a real estate experiment called New Orleans East, built atop a vast cypress swamp with ground too soft to support three people standing on it and — it would turn out — too soft to support the hubris of the Texas investors who built on it.

The Texans drained the swamp and erected a city of the future atop soggy land bounded by Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, Lake Borgne and the notorious Industrial Canal. Developers touted a space-age playground with shopping malls and an ice rink for the employees of the growing oil and gas industry and a nearby NASA facility. A New York Times article marveled at the vision: “City within a city rising in the South.”

Ivory Mae married again, to the author’s father, Simon Broom, one of the NASA workers. He brought more children and verve and merriment to the yellow house, fixing it with slapdash, good-enough husbandry and filling it with parties and music and laughter.

In 1965, Hurricane Betsy arrived.

“I was a tiny boy,” her brother Michael remembered. “Water was so high. I’m swimming, I’m swimming. The dogs, too. The water was moving through here like we was in a river.”

“Hundreds marooned on roofs as swollen waters rip levee. Hurricane Betsy leaves New Orleans with 16-foot flood,” said the front page of the Chicago Tribune.

Sound familiar?

The Broom family recovered, but the rest of New Orleans East didn’t. The investors didn’t make good on their vision, and the folks who could afford to leave did. The Brooms stayed, Simon Broom died, and the family struggled to keep the ailing house together while the neighborhood decayed around them.

Broom watched New Orleans East collapse on itself and her neighbors move away one after another; it was about this time that my job kept bringing me down Chef Menteur Highway. Parking lots were where you got robbed, residential streets were where johns got laid.

Broom was too embarrassed to bring friends over. “Prostitution on Chef Menteur Highway seemed the only industry still booming, not a downturn in sight,” she writes.

She fled to college, moved to New York and had a dream job working for O Magazine. Then Katrina struck, and the legacy of New Orleans’s struggles sucked her back in.

The yellow house twisted and broke in two. The family scattered to Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and California. New Orleanians didn’t usually leave New Orleans. In 2000, the city had the highest concentration — 77 percent — of residents who stayed where they were born. That changed with Katrina, which drained half the city’s population.

Three years after the storm, which she called “the Water,” Broom returned to New Orleans to work in the mayor’s office and write the story of this great city’s recovery. She quit after six months and explains the debacle with refreshing honesty.

It reads like real-life reporting from a Kafka book, an absurd world where paperwork is perpetually deemed incomplete, then lost again and again, and where a home is demolished after only one notice is sent to the broken, empty house.

“More and more I began to feel that I was on the wrong side of the fence, selling a recovery that wasn’t exactly happening for real people,” she writes, and confesses to what she thought of the mayor’s Road Home recovery program she was hired to tout. “Road to nowhere, I had taken to calling it.”

When she left the office to find stories of recovery to add to Mayor Ray Nagin’s speeches, she came up short. “Apartment complexes everywhere were still in ruins. It looked like the day after the Water, minus the flooding.”

And for those who had returned, “basic services such as trash pickup and water drainage were still scarce. Mounds of debris remained,” she writes.

Broom’s work here is an investigative reporter’s shaming story — from the profiteers who lured families to New Orleans East, to the failed Road Home recovery program that actually thwarted most residents’ returns — of our era’s messed-up priorities.

And we are left with the poignant vigil one of her brothers keeps over the plot of land where the yellow house once stood. He mows it weekly, tending to the fading memory of a home, when there is no home to return to.

The Yellow House

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By Angela Flournoy

• Aug. 9, 2019

THE YELLOW HOUSE By Sarah M. Broom

[ This was selected as one of the Book Review’s 10 best books of 2019. See the full list . ]

When Sarah M. Broom was in high school, she and her mother briefly attended a revivalist megachurch near their New Orleans home, the kind where people got “drunk on the Holy Spirit” and burned with “Holy Ghost Fire.” The youngest of 12 siblings, Broom spent her childhood on the hunt for an adequate mode of self-expression. She took to the practice of speaking in tongues. “The only control was in letting go,” she writes. “When you gave yourself over to it, it came bubbling out from you, this foreign language you did not need to study for, that was specific to you and your tongue, and that you did not know you spoke — until you did.” As an adult, Broom continued to seek the place and language that felt most like home to her, and it wasn’t until she returned to New Orleans, with its particular cadence and history and sins, that she found it.

This journey is one aspect of Broom’s extraordinary, engrossing debut, “The Yellow House,” but Broom recognizes that she needs to find the language to tell an even more expansive story. She pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir as a genre to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, “The Yellow House” is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. It is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large.

New Orleans East, where Broom grew up, is an area “50 times the size of the French Quarter,” yet nowhere to be found on most tourist maps. Her neighborhood, centered on the short end of a street cut off from the rest of the city by a raging thoroughfare, is a familiar sort for many black folks in this country: comprising the scraps of real estate whites have passed over or fled. We witness the street through the eyes of Broom’s 11 older siblings, who saw it transform from integrated and residential to segregated and “light industrial” over the years beginning in the ’60s. Broom leaves the street and New Orleans behind in the late ’90s.

The city demolished the house less than a year after Hurricane Katrina, the only prior notice having been, in an act of civic absurdity, mailed to its address. “Remembering is a chair that it is hard to sit still in,” Broom writes. “The Yellow House” is a conscious act of abiding in such memories in order to create a textual record where the physical one no longer exists.

[ "The Yellow House" won the 2019 National Book Award for nonfiction. Read more about the other award winners . ]

Broom is our guide, but not the sort who holds readers’ hands, uninterested as she is in tidy transitions between one type of writing and another. The through line is her thought process, her frequent questioning: “When you come from a mythologized place, as I do, who are you in that story?” she asks while living for a year in the French Quarter after a lifetime of merely shuttling through it for work. “Why do I sometimes feel that I do not have the right to the story of the city I come from?” she asks after signing the contract for this book and embarking on the research to write it. One question posed in the center of the book — “How to resurrect a house with words?” — trembles beneath the surface of every page, like the ripple of a stone dropped in water.

Broom searches for her own answers, undertaking what she calls “investigations” via archives and interviews and living. She claims that her favorite place to be is “on the verge of discovery,” and because she is skilled at making each inquiry feel urgent, this quickly becomes the reader’s favorite place as well.

Similar to the writer Gayl Jones, who in works like the novel “Corregidora” uses her characters’ dialogue to create a subtext of knotted history, Broom allows us to infer what might lie in the silences between the words her family members speak to her, during what must have amounted to whole days’ worth of recorded interviews. Here is Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, remembering her own darker-skinned mother: “She wasn’t black to me. She was my mama and my mama wasn’t black. Looked to me like they was trying to make my mama like the black people I didn’t like.”

The interviews also yield unforgettable scenes. As the waters rose during the worst of Hurricane Katrina, Broom’s older brother Carl, who also goes by Rabbit, stood in an attic with a meat cleaver, a gun and his two Pekingese dogs, Mindy and Tiger. Carl hacked his way out onto the roof, and the three were eventually ferried to dry land. “Mindy and them wasn’t on no leash,” he recalls. “I had some Adidas tennis on, but they was so tight. I took the shoestrings off and made leashes.”

These days, the question of who should be allowed to tell a story, whether fictional or fact-based, seems to hang in the air around many a work of literature. That Broom is a New Orleans native will automatically put some readers at ease, those who think authority is inextricably linked to biography; but that would be selling Broom’s craftsmanship short. The true test of her worthiness is her empathy and focused attention. She is a responsible historian, granting her subjects the grace of multiple examinations over the years. Her brother Darryl, drug addicted and desperate for money, frightens her as a teenager in the ’90s to the point that she doesn’t recall looking him directly in the eye. Years later we meet him again, the sobered-up head of a delightfully mundane Arizona household, his only daughter named after his wary, observant youngest sister.

The person who sustains the most considered attention is Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, the twice-widowed steward of the crumbling yellow house itself. “My voice is not a distinguished voice,” Ivory insists, but her words and actions buoy “The Yellow House,” holding up to the light those moments Broom was too young or unwilling to witness firsthand. “I was a little pathetic at first,” Ivory Mae admits of her early widowed years, “I needed to make myself know things.” She sets to this task with fervor, going to night school for her G.E.D. and a nursing credential so that she can fill the role of breadwinner suddenly thrust upon her. If Broom’s arc in this memoir is that of coming of age and consciousness, Ivory Mae’s is of doggedly persevering as her circumstances shift.

Ivory Mae tries mightily to keep the house in good condition, sewing curtains and valances to hide the disrepair, but the house is a “belligerent unyielding child”: Rats and lizards find their way inside, linoleum peels prematurely and areas under the sink grow slick with mold. “This house not all that comfortable for other people,” becomes Ivory’s standard rejoinder when the kids try to host sleepovers. This seesawing between stubborn pride in the home she bought herself and “slow creeping” shame for the poverty that prevents her from improving it makes the nature of its demolition, without her consent, one of the book’s central tragedies.

Ivory’s second husband, Simon Broom, died when their youngest daughter was 6 months old. “My father is six pictures,” she writes, photos she takes with her as she travels from Texas to Berkeley to as far as Burundi in an effort to understand where and how she fits in the world. A riveting, heartbreaking scene toward the book’s ending dramatizes Broom’s attempts to find additional physical evidence of him in city archives: “Part of me was afraid to see him alive. … In the world of dead parents, logic fails.”

Broom’s deadpan humor comes through clearest in her descriptions of herself. On the now-vanished supermarket she visited as a child: “one of my favorite places to act a fool.” On the tenuous position of authority granted to her by her siblings’ children, some of whom are older than she is: “I am these people’s Auntie even though I am still peeing in the bed.” These moments, coupled with the singular, unvarnished voices of her family members, coalesce to form a lesson on how to keep a necessarily heavy book feeling limber.

“Calling places by what they originally were, especially when the landscape is marred, is one way to fight erasure,” Broom writes. There are black and Latino neighborhoods from Detroit to Los Angeles where refusing to call a place by a new name is the last line of defense, but what happened in New Orleans East is more than the result of housing segregation, white divestment or the hyper-capitalist, winner-takes-all land grab that we call gentrification. “The Yellow House” is among other things a climate-change narrative, the book suited to these last days for taking action to prevent rising sea levels and other dire consequences of unfettered carbon emission.

Broom’s siblings, living in places like Vacaville, Calif., and Ozark, Ala., with no paths to come home, are part of the Katrina diaspora, and as extreme weather becomes the new normal, other diasporas have followed. The phrase “the Water” is the one she uses to refer to Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent displacement, loss of life and livelihood. One can imagine a wider array of people soon adopting this language — “the Water” becoming a shorthand for all that is lost when nature defies the plans we’ve made for where and how we live.

Any book as kinetic and omnivorous as “The Yellow House” is bound to succeed more on some fronts than on others. It begins at the chronological beginning, with Broom tracing her mother’s lineage, which means the first section of the book is more removed and reportorial. This doesn’t seem like a liability until around Page 100, when Broom’s own voice and perspective vault the language into another dimension. But even this choice feels rooted in Broom’s aesthetic intentions. “The Yellow House” is a book that triumphs much as a jazz parade does: by coming loose when necessary, its parts sashaying independently down the street, but righting itself just in the nick of time, and teaching you a new way of enjoying it in the process.

An earlier photo caption with this article misidentified one of the pictured subjects. Simon Broom, shown with the author’s sister Lynette in 1976, is their father, not their brother.

How we handle corrections

Angela Flournoy is the author of “The Turner House.”

THE YELLOW HOUSE By Sarah M. Broom Illustrated. 376 pp. Grove Press. $26.

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'the yellow house' connects place, memory and self-knowledge.

Martha Anne Toll

The Yellow House

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Sarah M. Broom's gorgeous debut, The Yellow House , reads as elegy and prayer.

The titular house is the fulcrum for Broom's memoir about her large and complex family. Perhaps more important, it stands in for the countless ways America has failed and continues to fail African Americans.

Broom is the youngest of her mother Ivory Mae's 12 children. Widowed at age 19, Ivory Mae invested her savings in a shotgun house — the yellow one — in East New Orleans. Until Texas millionaires moved in with big development plans and even bigger hype, no one knew quite what to call this area. "But namelessness is a form of naming."

Immediately, the house began sinking in the back, because the land had been a former cypress swamp, "too soft to support trees or the weight of three humans."

Within a few years, Ivory Mae married Simon Broom, a man 19 years her senior. They each brought children to the marriage and, together, had more. Shortly after they wed, they were struck by a devastating hurricane in which levees blew, 70,000 were left homeless, and hundreds more were marooned on roofs. This was Hurricane Betsy, roaring through New Orleans 40 years before Katrina, to similar effect.

Simon was a hardworking man who never quite finished improvements to the Yellow House. He died suddenly when author Broom was an infant, leaving her devoid of paternal memories. For the second time, Ivory Mae became a widow, this time, with a dozen children to raise on her own, the Yellow House her 13th.

In prose rife with longing, Broom maps her parents' lives before her, the forgotten neighborhood off Chef Menteur Highway where she grew up, and the rise and fall of "the Water" — as she refers to it — Hurricane Katrina, that took everything away. Raised by her loving and attentive mother, fractious and caring older siblings, and grandma, Broom was both confined and defined by the Yellow House, which steadily deteriorated as she grew up, even as Ivory Mae worked several jobs and kept it immaculately clean. What Ivory Mae couldn't do was keep up with the repairs, or the rats, or the insects, or the rain. "You know this house not all that comfortable for other people," Ivory Mae would say; words which held, "the gut-wrenching fact, the discovery even, that by not inviting people in, we were going against our natures. That is shame."

Broom felt the urge to leave — for the streets, for college and journalism school — for Harlem and a job with O Magazine , to Burundi where she skirted danger and held up a mirror against the people she lived among that pointed back to New Orleans.

Broom was away when Katrina struck: "That absence, my not being there physically, began to register in me on subtle emotional frequencies, I can see now, as failure." She chronicles the traumatic impact on her family: their diaspora to California and Texas and other parts, along with harrowing rooftop escapes.

In Katrina's aftermath, clearance trucks haul away the Yellow House without prior notification.

"The house held my father inside it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these traces, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was."

Broom comes back and takes a communications job with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. She spends time with her beloved brother Carl, a groundskeeper at NASA, who returns night after night to the empty plot where the Yellow House stood, babysitting the bare ground in an all but abandoned neighborhood, keeping the lot mowed because "the land could be taken away from us for any and for no reason — American History 101."

Nothing seems right. Even with her connections, Broom can't deliver her mother's reimbursement for the vanished house (that took seven years with multiple sets of lawyers "losing" papers). She feels helpless toward her city and disconnected from her roots. She leaves that job and begins researching this book, which is to say, her family history and the many tentacles of New Orleans that it touches. She can find zoning and housing records in offices all over town, but no clear guidance back home. For where is home? Her family is far flung and, as in Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped , her friends are dead, or in prison, or otherwise gone.

In its unfolding of the fraught bonds among family and land and loss, The Yellow House resonates as well with Lauret Savoy's poetic memoir Trace , which connects America's vast and varied landscape with the lost places of Savoy's mixed-race ancestry. So too, with J. Drew Lanham's The Home Place .

Sarah M. Broom is a writer of great intellect and breadth. She embraces momentous subjects. The Yellow House is about the relentless divestment of wealth from the African American family no matter how hard its members work; and our government's failure to protect its poor from predictable environmental catastrophe and subsequent trauma; and our gross neglect of poor neighborhoods; and sham promises that never materialize or are broken too easily, and the papering over of deep systemic problems by politicians and we the people.

The Yellow House is also about the persistence of love and grit. There's a mother who never flags or fails to support her children: "My mother buried her rage and despair deep within, underneath layers and layers of poise." And there's a young woman whose winding journey takes her away from and back to her family, as she circumnavigates the world in order to connect with herself — which means coming to the sober reckoning that some holes can never be filled.

If Broom has bitten off the whole world and cannot quite swallow it, we can only hope she will continue to mine this material with the same sensitivity and insight demonstrated in The Yellow House . She understands her questions are "at base, unanswerable."

"Remembering," she writes, "is a chair that is hard to sit on." Nevertheless, we will eagerly await her further interrogations.

Martha Anne Toll is the Executive Director of the Butler Family Fund ; her writing is at www.marthaannetoll.com , and she tweets at @marthaannetoll .

• sarah broom
• yellow house
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• New Orleans

Review: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

By Alanna Duncan

Sarah M. Broom’s debut book The Yellow House reads like a multifaceted map, not just of a place but an expanse of time, marking both relationships and absences. Part scrapbook and part oral history, it is an expertly curated museum exhibit of Broom’s family history. It is also a portrait of New Orleans East across the last 100 years.

Broom expertly starts from a time before she was born, enabling her to narrate her own birth and her early years. Through archival research, interviews, and her memories, Broom weaves a story that is wholly hers, without neglecting the lives of the many characters around her, including her mother, siblings, neighbors, and friends.

The memories and family tales recounted range from small, deeply personal moments—rich sensory descriptions of her surroundings on the day she put on her first pair of glasses—to the highly public and politicized. On the fourteenth anniversary of Katrina, Broom’s book not only remembers the disaster, but challenges readers to reckon with social and political structures in New Orleans that predated Katrina by over a century. Of the news coverage of that storm, she writes: “Those of us who were born to New Orleans already knew its underbellies. Storms, of all sorts, were facts of our lives. Those images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago knew.”

The titular shotgun house in New Orleans East is one of the central characters in the book. Already sinking into the soft earth when Broom’s mother purchased it in 1961, the yellow house on Wilson Street was not in a glamorous enough part of the city to appear on maps, but it was sold with the promise of a bright future. Cleaved in two during the storm, the yellow house lives on in Broom’s search to determine who has a right to the property, raising questions of governance, jurisdiction, and inequality. This book is filled with questions. Most go unanswered, but they provide a thrumming energy. What do we mean when we say home? How does one find home beyond the physical? How do we create these sacred spaces and who do we hold tightly?

The memoir-historiography hybrid is largely successful at creating an intricate narrative of family and place, but the four parts of the book feel disparate. They are written in different modes and the naming conventions of the short chapters are not consistent. At times, these structural elements do not feel precise or intentionally lawless, which distracts from the momentum of the story. 

Early in the book, Broom writes what feels like a provocation, part promise and part warning: “When people tell you their stories, they can say whatever they want.” What seems to be an offhand axiom at the beginning of the book turns out to be a central tenet throughout. Her telling of her own story is a testament to what we have to hold onto after forces of nature destroy our lives: family lore, and the moments that hang in our memories. About the author:

Alanna Duncan is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is at work on a collection of essays in queer forms.

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Of mothers & mother tongues: interview with ed bok lee.

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THE YELLOW HOUSE

by Sarah M. Broom ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019

A tribute to the multitude of stories one small home can contain, even one bursting with loss.

Broom reassembles her sizable family tree, damaged by time and uprooted by Hurricane Katrina.

As the author suggests in her debut book, her clan’s tempest-tossed experience was practically predetermined. She was raised in New Orleans East, an especially swampy section of the city so poor and distant from the city’s romantic center that it never appeared on tourist maps. In 1961, when Broom’s mother purchased the house of the title, it was hyped as a boomtown “involving men and money and wetlands, dreaming and draining and emergence and fate.” But rapid development covered up a multitude of municipal sins that emerged once the rains came. (The title refers in part to the yellow aluminum siding that cloaked rotting wood beneath.) The youngest of 12 siblings and half siblings, Broom knew much of her family only via lore and later research (her father died six months after her birth), which gives this book the feel of a heartfelt but unflinching recovery project. In the early portions, the author describes her family’s hard living (her mother was widowed twice) and the region’s fickle economy and institutional racism. Private school gave Broom a means of escape—she lived in New York working for O, the Oprah Magazine , when Katrina struck—but she returned to reckon with “the psychic cost of defining oneself by the place where you are from.” As family members were relocated around the country, she scrambled to locate and assist them, kept tabs on the house, and took a well-intentioned but disillusioning job as a speechwriter for controversial New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, insincerely hyping the city’s progress. Broom’s lyrical style celebrates her family bonds, but a righteous fury runs throughout the narrative at New Orleans’ injustices, from the foundation on up.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2508-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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How to Write the Book No One Wants You to Write

Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House is a feat—a memoir and historical narrative created amid governmental bureaucracy and resistance from some of her subjects.

Sarah M. Broom was writing long before Hurricane Katrina. What would ultimately become her memoir, The Yellow House , started as a collection of notes and essays on the house she grew up in, her family, her neighbors, and her local community in New Orleans. She began in the late 1990s after leaving home for college, and it eventually became impossible for her to see the work as anything other than a book project: a family portrait and a history of New Orleans, which would explore the larger social narrative of the United States.

While it’s impossible to underscore Hurricane Katrina’s impact on her family and the city at large, Broom’s hope with The Yellow House is to reveal the ways in which Katrina was no singular catastrophe. “When we boil Katrina down to a weather event, we really miss the point,” Broom told me recently over the phone. “It’s so crucially important for me to put Katrina in context, to situate it as one in a long line of things that are literally baked into the soil of this place.”

Broom recognized these connections, but her aim was not so clear to publishers. “The main complaint was that I needed to choose,” Broom recalled. “That I was either going to write a book about New Orleans or a book about my family, but not both—which was so confounding to me that I couldn’t even process it.” While memoir is often pigeonholed as subjective and emotional, the genre is a genuine entry point for history: Collective historical narratives are drawn from individual experiences. Broom writes in her book, “The facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life. The Yellow House was witness to our lives. When it fell down, something in me burst. My mother is always saying, Begin as you want to end . But my beginning precedes me.”

Read: Recovering from PTSD after Hurricane Katrina

In the book, Broom characterizes the events leading up to her mother’s purchase of the Yellow House in 1961, starting with the development of their New Orleans East neighborhood in the late 1950s. “From the beginning, no one could agree on what to call the place. But namelessness is a form of naming,” she writes. Broom notes that a pamphlet written by a local advertising agency promoting the area’s early development stated, “Here lies the opportunity for the city’s further expansion, toward the complete realization of its destiny.” She then offers periodicals and mayoral speeches that show how the area’s promise never came to pass. This scheme to drain the wetlands and get rich, Broom writes, was “not so different from the founding tale of New Orleans itself.”

Broom’s interest in her family’s neighborhood baffled others. Discovering archival photos of her father and fact-checking locations for a memoir was one thing, but researching the deterioration of residential zoning in New Orleans East to explore systematic disenfranchisement was another. No history had been written of the area; neither academics nor writers considered it essential to do so. After Broom pressed one city-records employee about zoning issues, his superior remarked to Broom, “We don’t have the liberty of going around and examining things the way we think makes sense.” It’s a telling statement, given that Broom’s book is an effort to take otherwise separate narratives and weave them together in order to construct a more expansive perspective on American history.

Before undertaking the creation of a heretofore unwritten social history, Broom returned to her earliest inspirations: her family and neighbors. The youngest of 12 siblings, Broom developed the habit of writing down conversations. This act of note-taking took root out of love, but over time it evolved into the motivation for her work as a writer. “For some reason, I had a very strong sense that everything [my family] said is critically important,” she told me. “I just love how they put words together.” In what could have been a simple exchange about what it was like for her mother to have a 12th child, Broom writes about the delicate nuance of managing the conversation.

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 say you were in distress. All them children I had, ain’t none of them ever been in no distress. And you have been in it ever since.

Interviewing her mother required great care and boundaries. As Broom notes in the book, “Mom closes down passageways to memory when something doesn’t make sense or when the thing or person no longer exists, which is possibly the same thing.” Broom told me that she had to work to “move beyond hagiography … not think of her as a mother, but to think of her as just a woman who made a series of choices. I created a physical distance for myself.”

Read: Hurricane Katrina’s uncharted diaspora

A hybrid project, The Yellow House required a lucid and thoughtful structure. “I made no distinction then or now between the house, my family, the street, New Orleans East, New Orleans, America. Those were all the same subject to me,” Broom told me. “And so how I did it structurally, first, I started with a family timeline: ‘In 1914, X happened.’ Then I layered on top of the family timeline the city timeline. Then I layered atop the city timeline, almost like a painting—there’s an actual file where this happens—I layered American history, and then I layered on top of that New Orleans East history. In that way, I could see very clearly the interstices where things met up. And then I could understand the story differently.”

Broom found that the absence of her home and the memories that collected there drove the framework of The Yellow House . “I knew when I started collecting evidence, so to speak, that I was trying to find the architecture of the book,” she said. “I needed to know where the beams were and what was the supporting wall. I literally thought of it as a house because I knew that I was trying to put a lot in it.” Using movement, not unlike sections of a piece of music, Broom found “a structure that felt a little malleable, where within each segment there could be differences in rhythm, and pace, and tone, and overall feeling, so that theoretically you could move the pieces around and still have a story.” The constant motion shares a double meaning with the themes of the book—migration and the threat of gentrification. “The book itself needed to feel and have this sense that this kind of displacement and scattering—inside the city and even now, just with people getting kicked out of neighborhoods and the rent being too high,” Broom said. “The book would contain this feeling that things were moving all over the place and needed to be gathered back together again.”

The Yellow House’s destruction, first by the flood and then by the city’s demolition of what remained, and the subsequent diaspora of her family, left Broom with an aching sense of absence. To confront this, she inserted herself more fully into the fabric of the book. As a teenager, she took two unreliable city buses from New Orleans East to the French Quarter to her job as a barista. As a successful adult, Broom returned to the city’s most historic district, a space that depends on the African American service workers who often cannot afford to live within its boundaries. Once behind the counter, Broom was now the local.

She sought to upend the conventional wisdom about this tourist-heavy area at the port of New Orleans, once a site of slave trading but now a fantasy that thrives on hedonistic behavior, southern charm, and decadence. “I’m always trying to make it about me in the French Quarter, about the interactions I’m having and how I’m seeing it specifically so I could turn these very trotted-out ideas on their head,” she told me. “If you’re trying to sort of examine the underbelly of something, you have to be able to move with the discovery and be malleable, so to speak.”

Living in the French Quarter placed Broom squarely in the city’s mythological and cultural heart. Moving from the periphery to the city center, Broom laid claim to a place that she was always made to feel was out of her reach. Too often geographic displacement narrows the comprehensive record of a place, privileging certain people with the final word on what is deemed history. Broom had to return to the city’s gem, home to its greatest pleasures and its greatest shame, to write a story that would reconcile her losses with the losses of others. She expanded the collective understanding of American history in the process.

StarTribune

Review: 'the yellow house,' by sarah broom.

Toward the middle of Sarah M. Broom's debut memoir, "The Yellow House," she writes, "We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not."

This is in a chapter titled "Erase," in which Broom's mother describes the city of New Orleans' demolition of their small, perpetually falling apart, resilient, intergenerational family home post-Katrina in this way: "Carl said those people then came and tore our house down. That land clean as a whistle now. Look like nothing was ever there."

These passages stopped me cold. Not for their beauty or wisdom, although they certainly reflect these qualities. But there were so many other equally beautiful and wise passages throughout Broom's moving 376-page narrative of personal, familial and place-based history. No, what stopped me was the knowledge that in delving deep into the complicated, sometimes exhausting specifics of the life and times of a single house, occupied by a single family over half a century, Broom has effectively told the story of black America in one fell swoop.

Of our ongoing quest to find home and place in the most tenuous of circumstances, even if it means building a foundation in a swamp, or trying to keep a decrepit house standing and too many children fed on meager working-class wages.

Reminiscent of Jesmyn Ward's "Men We Reaped" and Kiese Laymon's "Heavy," Broom's "The Yellow House" is only seemingly a personal memoir. At its core, it is a mythic rendering of the cost and brilliant tenacity of the American black family's struggle to confront, wrestle with and resist destruction in "the mouth of this dragon we call america," as writer Audre Lorde says.

What do you do when your hometown is destroyed by a hurricane that scatters most of your family across the country, probably permanently?

But "The Yellow House" is not just about the journey and ultimate loss of a physical family house. It fully embraces the idea of home as transcendent, as well. As Broom writes in her mother's voice: "And then you see the lives of the children and they become the living people of the house, the house lives in them. They become the house instead of the house becoming them. When I look at you all, I don't really see the house, but I see what happened from the house. And so in that way, the house can't die."

Shannon Gibney is a writer in Minneapolis. Her latest book was "Dream Country," published last fall.

The Yellow House By: Sarah M. Broom. Publisher: Grove Press, 376 pages, $26.

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The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom

A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising ...

Introduction

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant?the postwar optimism seemed assured. 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 expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.

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This was a great read however I didn’t need as much as the background that was given by the author. Her story was timeless and many facets of it covered a typical African American families in the south.... (read more)

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The Yellow House (2019 National Book Award Winner)

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In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant—the postwar optimism seemed assured. 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 expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.

Product Details

About the author, table of contents.

Movement I The World Before Me

I Amelia "Lolo" 13

II Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory 21

III Webb 36

IV Simon Broom 45

V Short End, Long Street 52

VI Betsy 69

VII The Crown 76

Movement II The Grieving House

I Hiding Places 101

II Origins 104

III The Grieving House 111

IV Map of My World 117

V Four Eyes 131

VI Elsewheres 136

VII Interiors 146

VIII Tongues 167

IX Distances 175

Movement III Water

II Survive 198

III Settle 209

IV Bury 216

V Trace 223

VI Erase 228

VII Forget 233

VIII Perdido 260

Movement IV Do You Know What It Means? Investigations

I Sojourner 287

II Saint Rose 294

III Saint Peter 298

IV McCoy 312

V Photo Op 319

VI Investigations 330

VII Phantoms 336

VIII Dark Night, Wilson 353

IX Cutting Grass 361

Acknowledgments 373

Photographs 377

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“…In this particular book, I think I wanted to combat the feeling that we were already inundated with, and even the feelings that are attached to social justice issues. I wanted to combat the feelings of anger and helplessness and all of that with joy.” Margaret Wilkerson Sexton follows her NAACP Image Award-winning novel The […]

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The author of the stunning new memoir “The Yellow House” took a reporter’s tools to trace her New Orleans family’s history back through decades, and to chronicle the impact of Hurricane Katrina on their collective lives.

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Orion Magazine

America's Finest Environmental Magazine

The Yellow House

Grove Atlantic, 2019. $26, 384 pages. 

IN A RECENT New York Times podcast interview, Sarah Broom reflected that in the era of climate upheaval, we’re all living with an inheritance of “soft ground.” Centered on the story of her mother’s camelback shotgun house in New Orleans East and its destruction by Hurricane Katrina, Broom’s new memoir The Yellow House is a meditation on family and loss that will speak powerfully to anyone who loves a place and seeks a stable foothold in our time of crisis and change.

In 1961, Broom’s mother Ivory Mae — newly widowed at nineteen — gathers her savings and buys the house at 4121 Wilson Avenue, her bid for what seems at first like the American Dream. New Orleans East, then in development and far from the tourist meccas of the Garden District and the French Quarter, isn’t even pictured on most city maps, its ground reclaimed from cypress swamp. The neighborhood nevertheless promises security in its planned community and the nearby jobs at NASA or the oil refinery. And Ivory Mae seizes the opportunity, remarrying and raising a blended family of twelve children in this home. Broom — the youngest of the twelve — grows up in a close-knit clan of siblings and neighbors, with pecan trees and bad dogs and stern big brothers as the constellations in her childhood sky.

Yet the fault lines are already showing: The ground underfoot always threatens to sink. A new highway bisects the neighborhood, cutting Broom and her siblings off from their school and catching Broom’s sister Karen in a near-fatal traffic accident. Broom’s brother Darryl slips into addiction. Ivory Mae, whose yearning for order and elegance weaves a bright sad line through the book, finds the house’s maintenance slipping out of her control: decorating with handmade curtains and the yellow siding that gives the house its name, yet she resorts to patching under-cabinet holes with aluminum foil. But the storm clouds of geography and money are gathering; when Katrina hits, the family scatters and the yellow house is destroyed, shaping the book’s poignant opening image: Broom’s older brother Carl, self-appointed guardian of the ruined lot, sitting in a lawn chair to guard what’s left of home.

The Yellow House testifies to the power of ferocious, omnivorous research and self-examination — with emotion pooling, swirling, returning, and settling like water — to set readers, as onetime New Orleans resident William Faulkner once said, in the heart in conflict with itself. Personally and civically, the situation often looks impossible. Working in the office of Mayor Ray Nagin, Broom sees the temperamental eruptions and flippant evasions that create a leadership vacuum in the post-Katrina city, the tourist economy that sustains and cannibalizes it, a collective mind shaped by casual violence, “Katrina craziness,” and a deep comfort with mortality and mystery, as well as bureaucratic ironies like that by which she’s ultimately dispossessed the notice of the yellow house’s impending demolition arrives in its mailbox where no one will ever be home again. The Yellow House enters the heart of a city we think we know to show us how the hopes of its residents — especially the historically dispossessed — the profit motive of developers, and the reality of marsh geography coincide. Like Elizabeth Rush’s Rising or Salvatore Settis’s If Venice Dies, this book will make readers reflect on the fate of cities linked, historically and spiritually, to the water that bears economic opportunity and impending doom.

For me, a fellow Southerner-in-exile, Broom’s lingering guilt and compulsion to return resonate—so does the way that she’s always obsessed with the house, always keeping notes on something about to be lost, wrestling in advance with solastalgia and grief. “Absences allow us one power over them,” she writes. “They do not speak a word. We say of them what we want. Still, they hover, pointing fingers at our backs. No place to go now but into deep ground.” With Sarah Broom as your guide, this is a journey you’ll be glad you made.

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