Dominique Browning's 'Slow Love,' reviewed by Carolyn See

SLOW LOVE

How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas, and Found Happiness

By Dominique Browning

Atlas. 271 pp. $23

In 2007, Dominique Browning was the editor of House & Garden magazine. She could justly take her place with other journalistic divas of the day, like Ruth Reichl of Gourmet and Paige Rense of Architectural Digest. Browning raced to work every morning and endured the strange cultural mores of the Condé Nast empire: "That elevator full of fashion snobs! It is legendary: how you're looked over, head to toe, by flocks of beautiful, mean girls, their needle-stung lips puckering in disdain." She dealt with gossip, rumors, deadlines . . .

Then suddenly there wasn't a job for her anymore; there wasn't even a magazine. The whole House & Garden enterprise went belly-up. Browning was out of work, left to pick up the pieces and put together something that looked like a nice life. She was 52.

Some years before all that, she had gone through a divorce and shared with her husband divided custody of their two boys. When this job disaster happened, the older one was already out of the house, and the younger still away at school. For the previous 10 years or so she had been involved in a love triangle with a man she calls "Stroller," who presented himself as legally separated but was still living at home with his wife. (The narrative is a little murky about this, but it seems that he stayed in the city with his wife during the week and repaired to his country home with Dominique on the weekends.)

This memoir is about how Dominique learned to slow down in her life (thus the title "Slow Love") and recapture the skills she wrote about in her magazine for many years, skills that had gotten a little rusty: "reading, thinking, listening, being a friend, simply feeling my body move through the world," or, put another way on a previous page, "playing house: doing my work, sweeping the floor, baking cookies, reading books, pouring tea -- doing anything I want to do, whenever I want to."

So, ideally, this would be the perfect gift for any woman who's recently lost a job, and there would seem to be plenty of them in this recession. Browning's voice is amiable enough, and there are a few serious events toward the end that she deals with in a graceful manner.

But there are caveats here, and they center on two serious concerns for everyone -- employed or not: love and money. People are sensitive to matters of love and money, and you don't want to be giving a book to people that's going to pitch them into a homicidal rage.

Money first. Browning, at the beginning of this narrative, lives in a lovely suburban house a few miles from Manhattan, where her boys spent (half) their childhood. After she loses her job, she finds she must put the house on the market and writes movingly about this process: the inevitable downsizing, the discarding of beloved relics from her family's past. But it turns out that she's had a whole other house over in Rhode Island, close to a pond, totally rebuilt, shining and gleaming, just waiting for her to move in. Most people don't have two houses that they can trade around like poker chips. It turns out that although she may be sad, money is not a real worry for Browning. She can, indeed, do what she wants. To a person drowning in the financial anxiety of unemployment, this might seem an insult, or worse.

The second caveat revolves around love. Before you give this memoir to anyone (and it is plainly designed as a decorative gift), be sure the receiver is predisposed to being an "other woman" rather than a wife. The man in Browning's life is steadfastly devoted to the woman he is still living with, as a surreal conversation after 9/11 reveals. In fact, he's had three wives, which he lies stoutly about. But he's Heathcliff to Browning! Nobody's perfect, but what are we to make of this object of heedless love, this man whom the author describes in a restaurant as "removing his suspenders to sit down, tucking his napkin into his collar and spreading it over his tie and shirt, discussing the wine with the sommelier, and joking with the waiter about the issues of the day." A man who cares for his laundry thus: "He gave his blue linen summer suits (he had several, all alike) long, loving soaks in the bathtub, stirring them gently from time to time; when part of one started to unravel, he had parts of others sewn into place. He got thirty or forty years out of his suits." His wife calls Browning repeatedly, asking her to cease and desist. "She was a screamer," Browning writes. Stroller won't let the author see his kids. "I was 'the devil,' " she writes. "I had not been allowed to meet their children, much less be in the same room with them."