Talking Volumes: A conversation with Sarah Broom
Kerri Miller hosts a conversation with award-winning author Sarah Broom about her book “The Yellow House.”
From the publisher:
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, 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.
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You can watch the conversation between MPR News host Kerri Miller and Broom here. Or listen to the using the audio player above.
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Editor’s note (May 24, 2021): A previous version of this post failed to note copy provided by the publisher. The post has been updated.