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Kerri Miller hosts a conversation with award-winning author Sarah Broom about her book “The Yellow House.”

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. 

MPR News host Kerri Miller and Broom here

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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.

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Kerri Miller hosts a conversation with award-winning author Sarah Broom about her book “The Yellow House.”


Talking Volumes: A conversation with Sarah Broom

Two women talk during a video voice chat.

Talking Volumes: A conversation with Sarah Broom

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