What is the author's tone in the memoir, The Yellow House?

Sarah Broom writes with a tone that is both literary and personal. She uses metaphor and figurative language to achieve both of those qualities. This can be seen when she writes about the loss of the Yellow House, how it made her feel, and how the physical structure of the house was metaphorically tied to her personal identity: “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 pressures 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” (232).

The tone of the book shifts when Sarah quotes dialogue from her other family members such as her brothers and mother. When quoting them, she maintains their patterns of speech, dialect, and use of slang. This helps to characterize them but it also evokes the aural tone of Sarah’s family and the environment she grew up in.