Every year in New Orleans there’s a Stella and Stanley shouting contest. Contestants vie to rival Marlon Brando’s bellow as Stanley Kowalski pining for his wife in “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “STELLAAAA!” The year after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city and the federal response was pitiful, the winner howled: “FEMA!”

Sarah M. Broom fits this anecdote into her forceful, rolling and many-chambered new memoir, “The Yellow House.” It’s one I’d heard before, but Broom makes it stick. Her memoir isn’t just a Katrina story — it has a lot more on its mind. But the storm and the way it scattered her large family across America give this book both its grease and its gravitas.

Broom, who was born in 1979, is the youngest of 12 children. Her father, Simon, worked in maintenance for NASA in New Orleans and played the banjo and trombone in a jazz band. The family lived way out in New Orleans East, seven miles from the city’s celebrated French Quarter. Broom suggests that New Orleans East, with its junkyards and trailer parks and flagrant prostitution, was a place the rest of the city mostly tried to forget.

This book is dense with characters and stories. It’s a big, simmering pot that comes to a boil at the right times. But the central character may well be the yellow house of the title. It’s a shotgun house that Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961 with insurance money after her first husband’s death. Simon, her second husband, was good with his hands and began to add onto the house.