A Q&A with Sarah M. Broom
The Yellow House is a memoir, but it’s so much more than that. You use your family’s history in New Orleans, especially as it relates to your childhood home, to tell a story that is as journalistic as it is literary. How does history, fact, and reportage inform what you do as an artist?
I am interested in what happens when we layer aspects of narrative on top of another – personal and local history, family lore and national lore, etc. My training is in journalism, and a love for investigation – for the primary source – grew in me as I was writing this. But some “evidence” doesn’t always appear in the official records. In The Yellow House I explore the limitations of that, using oral history, a traditionally black art, to fill in many of the gaps. But I am also a voracious reader and think of my work in conversation with many writers I love, most of whom are masters of place: Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid, John Edgar Wideman, Joan Didion, W.G. Sebald and others.
Many writers talk about needing distance from a place – both psychological and geographic – to write about it. You moved back to New Orleans while you were writing The Yellow House. How did this affect what the book eventually became?
This book tries to explore the distance between one place and another, psychically and otherwise. By setting myself up in the French Quarter in one of the most mythologized corners of the entire city, I was able to further explore New Orleans East, the far less touted area of the city where I come from. But there were moments when I traveled quite far – Burundi, especially – to better understand New Orleans, too. I needed both the closeness to gather the granular detail and then the distance to see it all more globally. I was building context. This movement – away and toward – became, for me, a kind of texture within in the book itself.
Some years ago, you enrolled in memoir workshops at 92Y. With whom did you study and what did those instructors – and those classes – teach you about figuring out how to tell a story like The Yellow House?
I first wrote about my childhood friend Alvin in Hettie Jones’ workshop. I also explored, at Hettie’s behest, some of the thornier questions of how a certain house, an architecture, a geography, might elicit shame. That class was a kind of formal beginning for this work. Hettie taught me to write without judgment. Gave me permission, in some way I cannot pinpoint, to think of myself as a writer even. These are, as I think about it now, incalculable gains. I also studied with Joyce Johnson, who was so brilliant. Once she actually sketched out for me some version of the book I might write – just to help me think about structure. I saw them both as great artists and laborers in the art. They shored me up to do the difficult work no matter how long it might take.
You’ll be talking to writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman at 92Y, whose book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, another intimate, extraordinary, historically minded chronicle of American cities, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019. What does Professor Hartman's work mean to you?
Hartman is a teacher of mine – not literally, but on the page. Her work on the archive – what is officially saved for historical posterity, and what isn’t – is still informing, to this day, my own work. She teaches us not only to shift the frame but to remake it entirely.