Buy This Book! SLOW LOVE, How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas and Found Happiness

People show up for things, their jobs, their marriages and families. They make routines, make a good life and then something terrible happens, rudely, abruptly. Without warning, the spouse leaves, or the job is gone, or you lose your house or your health, whatever. Now what? Dominique Browning’s memoir SLOW LOVE, How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness is a contemplation of this dark place. It is a purely honest and courageous record of her journey through and from the place where she lost her job of thirteen years and then a long-term relationship and then sold her house, (she was already divorced years before) and relocated hours away. Oh, and her children grew up and left too so there was the empty nest thing to contend with (and even that isn’t all). It isn’t a straight-out journey for her either, but fraught with setbacks, doubts, fears and sorrow, yet reading about it is rather like sitting with a very dear friend and having a lovely conversation, one that is rewarding and heartfelt, where you laugh and cry and see yourself in the mirror of each other’s experience. Slow Love is a remedy, a gentle balm to any reader, but most especially to those who have experienced or who are experiencing a dark night.

In another of Dominique Browning’s memoirs, Paths of Desire, The Passions of A Suburban Gardener, (Scribner, February 1, 2005) I fell in love with her house and especially the garden, the one she has now sold, and in reading Slow Love, I felt the loss of it, too, until the end of Slow Love where she writes so eloquently and with such joy of her new life and home that my own heart soared to imagine her there. I loved this memoir. And her website is worth a visit too: http://www.slowlovelife.com/