Browning's out of the bubble and into life with Slow Love

Dominique Browning has cool, wolfish eyes, as blue as a David Hockney poolscape, but her voice - American east coast flat, almost granular - is fissured, betraying flashes of anguish and desire.

The former editor of US-recession casualty House and Garden, Browning, 55, is the author of four coffee-table books under the House and Garden brand and three graceful memoirs of redemption that pivot on the Edenic plenitude of gardens. All but one of these memoirs were, ironically, written in a corporate stupor: in between meetings, and perhaps as a means of avoiding a difficult array of truths.

Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pyjamas, and Found Happiness is the latest in the series, and also what Browning holds is her breakthrough book, the one through which she has discovered a new courage and capacity for happiness.

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.