An account of the aftermath of her sacking after 13 years of corporate devotion, Slow Love addresses questions of value, both individual and universal, without ever threatening the reader with too much intimacy. Even an episode with cancer is dismissed in a matter of pages. 'For a week or two, I was full of gratitude and awe at the beauty of life's simplest pleasures,' she writes. 'And then I started fleeing as fast as I could from the stark evidence of mortality.'

Composed in the study of her Rhode Island house, Browning acknowledges disguising her introversion. 'I put a bubble around myself,' she says. 'I'm an extrovert by training. Losing my job was very, very difficult, but it made me think about what I was doing here. What was this big unresolved thing in my life? But because I was so busy and distractible - my life was quite compartmentalised with work and my two sons - it could slide for a long time.'

In hiring Browning to relaunch House and Garden in 1995, publishing house Conde Nast was, paradoxically, responsible for her evolution from editor to memoirist. 'The editor's column opened me up,' she says. 'It gave me the opportunity to evolve a whole part of me that had not been expressed before.'

Her intimate life has suffered as a result of her containment. She was married for a decade to award-winning author Nicholas Lemann, now dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and the father of her two grown sons, and before that was involved with Gary Fisketjon, the editor of writers such as Raymond Carver, Bret Easton Ellis, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy and her long-time friend, Jay McInerney.

In Slow Love, Browning documents the erosion of the long affair she had with a man she nicknames Stroller, a poetic, ambivalent, eccentric, thrice-married, linen suit-wearing wine lover who, despite legal separation, continued to share an apartment with the mother of his children.

McInerney was hired by Browning to write a wine column for House and Garden, and his opinion of Browning's work has always been high. At a House and Garden gala auction in 2003, McInerney, flushed with sun or wine and clad in what appears to be a rumpled linen suit, is seen in photographs smiling with his arm tightly around her.

Observing that McInerney's career trajectory has been 'thrilling', Browning concedes he is 'a wonderful friend. He brought a kind of passion and eccentricity to his House and Garden columns that I loved and really admired. I like people who are very different from me. People who are introverted like having extroverts around because they do all the work for them. I've always loved people who go to all the parties and come back and tell me what it was like, you know? But Stroller was an introvert.'

Browning's obsession with Stroller was carnivorous. She persisted with religious fervour, seeking validation, distraction, love. 'I subconsciously wanted to unleash in his bed something that would never stay within its borders, no matter how much it was pushed back, cut down, and abused,' she writes, ostensibly about the mint she planted in his garden which he had burned back. Clearly, she was lost within the loss.

'That's why I felt this incredible raw fear,' Browning agrees, her voice breaking a little. 'My motto is: just try harder. If something isn't working, just try harder. And it is very hard to come up against something that simply isn't going to be affected by trying harder.

'Losing the job put me in a space of feeling completely vulnerable and questioning where my life had gone. And just removing myself, working through. The relationship with Stroller was basically over when I lost my job, but I was still attached to it. And so that was what I was trying to figure out, what I was trying to work through.'

Browning's tolerance of emotional abuse had always been high. One of four children of a 'compassionate' Kentucky-born surgeon and a 'very strict' French mother, she was made to understand by her mother that her value lay exclusively in performance. As a result, she spent 'hours and hours' at the keyboard, training as a classical pianist.

These days, Browning's routine is more organic. After 'at least' eight hours' sleep, she wakes early, enjoys some white tea, then writes until noon, when she lunches, does administrative tasks, and exercises. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, and a columnist for the Environmental Defence Fund. At night, she avoids the computer, preferring to watch movies, read, or see friends. She is now dating a man with 'exactly those qualities I love - kindness, juiciness, largeness, not married'.

Browning's aim is to 'continue deepening' her relationship with the concept of slow love. 'Finding time in the day to be mindful and take nourishment and nurturing the world,' she quietly says. 'The book signifies the first time I have flown solo. With my other books, I could always hide behind my job, whereas with Slow Love, I'm out there on my own. Having got to a place where I feel free to express what I'm thinking feels like a real achievement to me. I could never have done this, even two years ago.'