The winners of the National Book awards for 2019 were announced on November 20 at a ceremony in New York City at Cipriani Wall Street restaurant. Today’s post discusses the winning non-fiction entry The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom.
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, 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.
Judges Citation
If
Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House was
simply an indictment of state sanctioned terror on the Gulf Coast, it would be
a stunning literary achievement. Broom however shows us that such an account
without breathtaking rendering of family and environment is, at best,
brittle. The Yellow House uses reportage, oral history, and astute political
analysis to seep into the generational crevices, while reveling and revealing
the choppy inheritances rooted in one family in the neighborhood of New Orleans
East.
Other non-fiction
finalists this year were:
--What
You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché
--The
Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
--Solitary
by Albert Woodfox with Leslie George
--Thick:
And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
About the
Author
Sarah M. Broom is a
writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine,
The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine among others. A native New
Orleanian, she received her Masters in Journalism from the University of
California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative
Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the
Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded
fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She
lives in New York state.
Editorial
Reviews
…Broom's extraordinary,
engrossing debut…pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir as a genre to
create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral
history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, The
Yellow House is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference
and poor city planning that led her family's home to be wiped off the map. It
is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future
of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large…The Yellow House is a
book that triumphs much as a jazz parade does: by coming loose when necessary,
its parts sashaying independently down the street, but righting itself just in
the nick of time, and teaching you a new way of enjoying it in the process.
The New York Times Book
Review - Angela Flournoy
Esoterica:
How
many titles are submitted for the National Book Award?
In
2018, 1,637 titles were submitted for consideration for the National Book
Award. Of these titles, 368 were for Fiction, 546 were for Nonfiction, 246 were
for Poetry, 142 were for Translated Literature, and 325 were for Young People’s
Literature.
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