Slow Love
Slow Love by Dominique Browning Atlas & Company HK$184
Up until November 2007, Dominique Browning, a decorous American beauty, was the editor-in-chief of House & Garden, a magazine with a readership that ran into many hundreds of thousands. Then the recession hit the magazine industry. At the age of 52 she found herself without a job. Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas & Found Happiness is her story.
The divorced mother of two grown children, Browning had previously gone 'cold with fear' at the prospect of losing the job that distracted her from the poverty of her emotional life. Her world was one in which an Upper East Side aesthete berated her decorator for not having her sofa cushions delivered on September 12, 2001, and in which she never operated in real time: Browning would be working on the September issue in May, and on the April issue at Christmas. 'I always felt out of step with the seasons,' she recalls.
At home, Browning's sense of desolation builds to a conviction of abandonment and then terror. 'The last time I felt this [exhausted] was when I had a newborn and was so exhausted from nursing through the night ... that I couldn't get into grown-up clothing until late in the afternoon,' she writes.
And yet in spiritual terms, Browning's retrenchment was to prove the best thing that ever happened to her. She initially reacts by overeating, sleeping 12 hours at a stretch, drinking too much, morosely reflecting on her every failure and dwelling on refracted thoughts of suicide.
Her regrets are primarily romantic; a decade-long, unassumingly masochistic affair with a married man distracts her from examining her parenting. When her youngest son 'barely acknowledges a message', she does not question her mothering skills, but feels that it 'has not yet occurred to him ... that his mother's need for him might be its own best, most specific and necessary reason to call'.
Browning, a cancer survivor, is then ordered to lose weight by her doctor. She takes up yoga, and begins to address her neglected garden. She logs up to 10 hours a day there despite the fact that 'it may be a futile effort'.
There are, in Browning's life, no passionate catharses. She comes to life slowly, without fanfare, and always with a peripheral sense of loss. She is, she realises, rarely present. 'It is a chronic symptom of our overconnected, under-engaged times, a way of being neither here nor there, and certainly not in the moment,' she writes.
In the end, Slow Love is a memoir of quiet power, parochial and stifled but all the more intriguing for its inadequacies. Browning's prose is always beautiful, but her greatest failure remains masked: she remains a woman insulated by financial privilege and self-concern, with only the most tenuous of relationships with humanity.
