 The Yellow House was written by Sarah M. Broom, and won the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction. Read an interview with the author. 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. Discussion Questions for the meeting: 1. At the opening of the story, Sarah Broom describes the lot where the Yellow House once stood from fifteen thousand feet above. Have you ever brought up a Google Earth image of your house from above and zoomed out? What impact did seeing your home, your street, your state, your country have on your perspective? 2. What are the truths we think we know about New Orleans compared to the story Broom tells? 3. The author refers to Hurricane Katrina throughout as “the Water.” Why do you think she made this choice? What does that term communicate to you? 4. What information does Broom give us about the fate of New Orleans’s population after the storm that was new to you? 5. Broom’s family dispersed after Katrina and many did not return. What effect do you think this kind of scattering after climate crises has on regional culture? 6. In many ways, this is a story of how America has failed African Americans. Was there anything that could have been done differently on the swath of land in New Orleans East that would have changed the outcome? 7. Did this book bring to mind stories from your history tied to a special place, a home, land, or city? 8. There were many powerful stories within the book. Was there one that stood out for you? 9. Sarah says that “Big changes, the ones that reset the compass of a place, never appear so at the outset. Only time lets you see the accumulation of things.” Can you cite an example of this in the book or in your own life’s experience? 10. What are your thoughts about the end of the book? Were you satisfied with the final actions of the land that the Yellow House sat on? Was justice served to the family that lost their Yellow House? | 
