Similar to the writer Gayl Jones, who in works like the novel “Corregidora” uses her characters’ dialogue to create a subtext of knotted history, Broom allows us to infer what might lie in the silences between the words her family members speak to her, during what must have amounted to whole days’ worth of recorded interviews. Here is Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, remembering her own darker-skinned mother: “She wasn’t black to me. She was my mama and my mama wasn’t black. Looked to me like they was trying to make my mama like the black people I didn’t like.”

The interviews also yield unforgettable scenes. As the waters rose during the worst of Hurricane Katrina, Broom’s older brother Carl, who also goes by Rabbit, stood in an attic with a meat cleaver, a gun and his two Pekingese dogs, Mindy and Tiger. Carl hacked his way out onto the roof, and the three were eventually ferried to dry land. “Mindy and them wasn’t on no leash,” he recalls. “I had some Adidas tennis on, but they was so tight. I took the shoestrings off and made leashes.”

These days, the question of who should be allowed to tell a story, whether fictional or fact-based, seems to hang in the air around many a work of literature. That Broom is a New Orleans native will automatically put some readers at ease, those who think authority is inextricably linked to biography; but that would be selling Broom’s craftsmanship short. The true test of her worthiness is her empathy and focused attention. She is a responsible historian, granting her subjects the grace of multiple examinations over the years. Her brother Darryl, drug addicted and desperate for money, frightens her as a teenager in the ’90s to the point that she doesn’t recall looking him directly in the eye. Years later we meet him again, the sobered-up head of a delightfully mundane Arizona household, his only daughter named after his wary, observant youngest sister.

Image One question — “How to resurrect a house with words?” — trembles beneath the surface of every page, like the ripple of a stone dropped in water. Credit...

The person who sustains the most considered attention is Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, the twice-widowed steward of the crumbling yellow house itself. “My voice is not a distinguished voice,” Ivory insists, but her words and actions buoy “The Yellow House,” holding up to the light those moments Broom was too young or unwilling to witness firsthand. “I was a little pathetic at first,” Ivory Mae admits of her early widowed years, “I needed to make myself know things.” She sets to this task with fervor, going to night school for her G.E.D. and a nursing credential so that she can fill the role of breadwinner suddenly thrust upon her. If Broom’s arc in this memoir is that of coming of age and consciousness, Ivory Mae’s is of doggedly persevering as her circumstances shift.