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Thursday, April 1, 2021
GO! magazine — A&E in Northeast Oregon
the
BOOK NOOK
■ Book Group: ‘The Yellow House’ by Sarah M. Broom
JOSEPH — To celebrate Women’s History
Month, the Josephy Book Group is reading
“The Yellow House,” a memoir by Sarah M.
Broom.
The Tuesday, April 6, edition of the Josephy
Center’s ongoing Brown Bag discussion series
will be a livestream discussion of the book.
The book group and the Brown Bag discus-
sion are open to all, whether you’ve read the
book or not. Join the livestream via the link at
www.library.josephy.org/book-group at noon.
For more information on the book group and
other programs, classes and exhibits at the
Josephy Center for Arts and Culture, go to
www.josephy.org, call 541-432-0505 or visit
the center at 403 N. Main St., Joseph, Monday
through Friday between noon and 5 p.m.
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 12 children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s
birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s 13th and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s “The Yellow House” tells a hundred
years of her family’s story 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 Hurricane Katrina wiped the Yellow House off the
map.
“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.
ATTENTION READERS
GO! editors are seeking book reviews written by local
readers and information on book clubs and other literary
happenings in Northeast Oregon. Send submissions and
— Review from www.library.josephy.org/book-group
ideas to lkelly@lagrandeobserver.com.
■ Looking for your next good read?
What to read next? Check out the Josephy Book Club’s previous titles: go to
www.library.josephy.org/bookgroup and scroll down.
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