Jobless Recovery
By MIRANDA SEYMOUR
Published: May 6, 2010
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Dominique Browning had the world at her feet. She had written two inspiring and widely admired books that combined tantalizing fragments of memoir with graceful meditations on the healing power of place. She had — so the first of those books, “Around the House and in the Garden,” told us — allowed her own home to salve the wounds caused by the brusque ending of a 15-year marriage. “Paths of Desire,” Browning’s follow-up book, applied the same treatment, with the same entrancing combination of humor and humanity, to a beloved garden. What Browning scarcely mentioned in either book was that for nearly 13 years she was also the editor in chief of House & Garden magazine. Work, she now confesses, was “the scaffolding of my life.”
SLOW LOVE
How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas and Found Happiness
By Dominique Browning
271 pp. Atlas & Company. $23
Related
Sunday Magazine: Dominique Browning on Losing Her Job (March 28, 2010)
Browning is very funny about the peculiarities of working within the 48-story palace of consumer dreams that is the Condé Nast building. Where else, she asks, would you find yourself being summoned to the office of the C.E.O. and rebuked for failing to wear enough designer clothes? And where else but at Condé Nast would she have been asked how long she planned to waste company money on a car service while commuting to work after major cancer surgery?
Such treatment might have tempted a less resolute woman to hand in her resignation. But that show of frugality from her overlords might also have alerted Browning to the fact that her magazine was in peril. In November 2007, House & Garden was abruptly closed down and its offices efficiently eviscerated, emptied of everything except the computers and some expensive bolts of fabric that management proved keen to retain. The change from busy, productive work space to security-guarded vacancy took just four days. The editor in chief of Architectural Digest, the tumbled magazine’s fiercest competitor within the Condé Nast empire, rubbed salt in the wound by publicly announcing that she intended to blacklist from her own pages all previous supporters of the fallen rival. “I felt,” Browning recalls, “as if I had walked into ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales.’ ”
Losing a job can have the same unpleasant side effect as a long illness or a bereavement: misfortune can drive friends away, and fast. Gone, Browning discovered, were the busy days when she zapped the morning flow of incoming e-mail with the insouciant pleasure of a someone swatting flies. Home, alone and unemployed, she found herself casting yearning looks at the computer. Now it seemed as if nobody but she herself ever had time to chat. “Where did everyone go?” A former pal did finally get in touch, but not for friendship’s sake: “You’ve lost your power! Now I can say anything I want to you!”
Losing a job without just reason can cause the victim to become very angry. And wrath provides the one ingredient that had previously been absent from Browning’s writing. Fueled by rage, she has become not only an elegant and meditative writer but a pungently witty one, spinning out one-liners with throwaway ease. (“I began to knit him a scarf,” she discloses of a certain recalcitrant man. “Yes, I wanted to strangle him.”)
The man Browning wishes to throttle is the successor to the suave True Love of her previous book. (Browning goes in for such abstractions; identities are concealed, with faintly annoying cuteness, with names like the Bitch, the Artist, the Helpful Men.) She wanted, so she tells us, to call him Walker because he kept walking away. Instead, and more forgivingly, she calls him Stroller, the name preferred by this errant and seemingly impenitent lover. (The name, as he announces just a touch too glibly, acknowledges the invention that enriched his family: the stabilizing and soothing spring mechanism that upheld an old-fashioned baby stroller.)
Stroller plays an important role in Browning’s bumpy journey toward the peace she craves, and doesn’t immediately find, in her new life of enforced leisure. Her lover’s selfish behavior isn’t conducive to achieving any such Zen-like serenity. (Stroller is a languidly married man who, with disquieting candor, admits that his fondness for Browning, the ever available Other Woman, deepens only after a glass or two of wine: “It isn’t the wine that makes me feel love. But the wine lets me be overcome by it.”) His frequent absences enforce the most addictive and tormenting form of romantic slowness, the waiting game, fed by what Browning lucidly identifies as “the weirdly intoxicating potion of loving unavailability.”
Over the years, Stroller proves reliable mainly in his ability, like the Cheshire Cat, to come and go at will — his will, not Browning’s. In fact, he still appears to be around, since she thanks him in her acknowledgments for commenting on the manuscript and pointing (she coolly lets us know) to her distortions of the truth.
Waiting takes many forms in Browning’s book. Some are hilarious. While waiting for a misconceived blind-date dinner to run its slow course, she devises innumerable strategies to endure its longueurs. Among these exercises in self-distraction: “Practice raising one eyebrow; switch to the other eyebrow; practice the stealthy moves involved in locating my lost shoe under the table without drawing any attention to the problem; practice left-handedness; practice the multiplication table, especially sevens.” Other waiting games prove to be as delightfully uncomplicated as learning how to use a slow cooker. (I never have, but Browning is the first writer who has almost convinced me that a single pot might just conceivably improve my life.)
The art of patience isn’t, however, what Browning really wants to describe, or indeed to offer as a panacea for grief and loneliness. The more serious aim of “Slow Love” is to demonstrate the madness of schedules, the inhumanity of routine. She has written before about how a sudden shock can, with careful handling, be turned into a benefit. “Paths of Desire” began, memorably, with the swift and entire collapse of a concrete wall onto a favorite, hard-won patch of the author’s suburban garden. It isn’t hard to see that Browning is deploying that same dramatic pattern here, with the collapse of a job rather than the wall as an inescapable event that highlights, like it or not, the need for change and progress.
The most sensitive parts of “Slow Love” describe the triumph of spirit over circumstance. I could have done without the goody-goody quotations from the poet Mary Oliver. (“You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions.”) But I will return — with a little of the refreshed pleasure I can still get from reading about Walden Pond — to Browning’s sublime account of what she calls “the intertidal years,” and of a slow twilight journey by kayak across a pond near her Rhode Island home. Here, triumphantly, she makes the case for slow love achieved, a process she describes as the flip side of nostalgia: the state of “knowing what you’ve got before it’s gone.”
Still, reading her account of an osprey winging its way toward the pond’s encircling trees with the ripped corpse of a fish clutched in its talons, I did briefly wonder which figure from her Condé Nast days might have been in Browning’s mind.
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