A Multilayered Achievement

Guest Post by Andrea Roach

I am reading Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, a memoir about generations of family and place (New Orleans, pre & post-Katrina, and their family homes). One of the things that I like about this book is the artful way the author brings the reader into what could be an extremely confusing story, with so many characters and the landscape of New Orleans, by initially laying it out like a map: this is where my neighborhood and my house fit into the history of NOLA, and here’s a blueprint of my relatives leading to me. She refers to Katrina as The Water and so, like the Yellow House, makes it its own complicated character. It’s a multilayered achievement that connects history, politics, race, culture, disaster, and identity, while also telling the ways in which we become our homes and our homes become us. I’d recommend!

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. Grove Press, August 2019.

Reviewer bio: Andrea Roach is a writer of memoir, essays, and creative nonfiction. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and was a finalist for The Writer’s Room of Boston Fellowship Award.

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