“Slow Love” by Dominique Browning is the real thing

I first picked up Slow Love by Dominique Browning with low expectations. In my years in the home furnishings industry, I occupied a peripheral place in the rarified air of the high-end design trade, where, from my perch on the sidelines, I saw enough self-serving arrogance to have made unwarranted assumptions about the likes of Dominique Browning, editor-in-chief of House and Garden.

Who knew that there below the surface of that haughty, ice-blue gaze I encountered month in and month out at the bottom of the editorial page, beat the heart of a real live, muffin-bingeing, dirt-digging, relationship-struggling, children-juggling, weight-gaining woman, so very much like…me. There’s a big lesson here, and, believe me, it was not lost.

When I first began to read, I found myself keeping Dominique at arms length. I wasn’t going to give her an inch until she proved herself. Was she for real? But, as we moved into “Winter,” she had me. Having lived through more than one “winter” myself, literal and figurative, I had to concede that this was the real thing. Honest, gutsy, self-revealing, she emerged for me through her pain, insomnia, and sheer force of determination to ride it out, a heroine worth the title, and a woman I could call friend.

Familiar musings:

“I begin to wonder about everything I have missed in being fearful.” “My life, if I am to live it properly, is suddenly full of necessary repeats…And how could I reach the final form, the plagal, the amen cadence? Let it be.” “I am becoming, once again, an amateur musician. I am playing for my own pleasure, and I am learning to silence the critic  in my head, the one who will not stop telling me that nothing I do is good enough.” “Nothing works the way it used to. I cannot move my hands through the music the way I hear it in my head. But every once in awhile…I produce a sound that is light and clear. I take all the repeats. I observe the rests. I enjoy myself. I am happy for small boned miracles.”

By the end of “Summer,” both Dominique and the text have grown quiet. There is a newfound space, a larger context, a hard-won acceptance. 

She’s even begun to sound like my beloved Annie Dillard:

“This pond then is home to me, at least for now. I’ve come to accept that I can’t count on anything to be permanent and it no longer matters….I picked this place to be my home; I wasn’t born to it. I picked it, and now I have grown into it.” “When I go to the edge of the sea, I marvel at the constant change, wonder at what has turned up in the swells…mystery, movement, and magic.” “I have just begun to accept the relentless flux that is the condition of my life, of all our lives. Not young, not old, not betrothed, not alone; thinking back, looking forward; not broken, not quite whole anymore either. But present. These are my intertidal years.”

Slow Love is worth a slow read. It’s a beautiful, intimate little tome that fit my hand, and moved into my heart with equal ease.

Thank you Dominique. You’ve reminded me that as women and human beings, we all suffer in similar, though not always apparent ways. But not everyone has the clarity, self awareness, and facility with language to convey the tangled path through pain and confusion and out the other side with such grace and humor. With a kindred spirit, I offer appreciation, not only for your journey, but for your courageous offering of words, tears, and laughter.