Day 227, Quasi-Quarantine: Beautiful "The Yellow House" Would Have Benefited From More Vulnerability

"My mother is always saying, Begin as you want to end. But my beginning precedes me. Absences allow us one power over them: They do not speak a word. We say of them what we want. Still, they hover, pointing fingers at our backs. No place to go now but into deep ground."

A "National Book Award" winner in 2019, "The Yellow House" serves as both lamentation for and love story to New Orleans East. 

Author Sarah M. Broom weaves a beautifully written and poignant story, centered on her childhood home that succumbed to the elements and the ingrained corruption of New Orleans. The tale is, in turns, heartbreaking, funny, thought-provoking, and draining. 

Broom's depictions of the abandonment of New Orleans East, her long-delayed eulogy to her friend Alvin, and her Hurricane Katrina narratives from her siblings are all immensely powerful.

The book is at its most resonant when Broom allows herself in enough to talk transparently about the challenge of shame and the pain of memory.

"Here came the shifty settling in of shame ... Shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it. Like water."

Despite the occasional vulnerability, however, the author's seeming lack of agency hinders the telling for me. Relationships, job choices, residential decisions ... they are all described as happening to her and not created by her. 

Her voice shines through at various times, but other times she seems to only bear witness -- a necessary and honorable function, but more is expected of a memoir grounded in truth.

"I had no home. Mine had fallen all the way down. I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me. We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not. When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressure and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house."

I left the book feeling like a writer of Broom's unmistakable gifts may have needed to push herself a bit more to ingrain herself in her own origin story. 

"When you come from a mythologized place, as I do, who are you in that story?", she asked at one point. At the end of the day, I feel it is this question that Broom was never quite able to answer in her own book.

"Defining myself almost exclusively by a mythology, allowing the city to do what it does best and for so many: act as a cipher, transfiguring itself into whatever I needed it to be. I did not yet understand the psychic cost of defining oneself by the place where you are from."