DOMINIQUE BROWNING

by Bernard Maisner

Have you ever clipped off part of a philodendron plant and then put that clipping into a bowl of water in a new location? It is a bit of a violent trauma, and some doubt is raised as to if it will survive. But then, after some time, the wound begins healing and roots begin sprouting. And a new life—an old life actually, but somehow as a newly reinvented individual—takes its place in the world.
House and Garden magazine had been in existence for 92 years, until 1993, when publication ceased. Then, two years later, it sprouted new roots with a new editor. Dominique Browning took charge, built readership up from zero to about one million, and brought scholarship, intellect, warmth and emotion to the newly designed magazine under Condé Nast’s helm. Never a magazine about materialism, it celebrated the home as a place where the most intimate and important aspects of one’s life took place. Browning was beloved as the editor for 13 years. It was a “productive, rich, wonderful and interesting time,” she remembers. Her monthly editorial essays brought smiles and tears to the eyes of the readership. Browning had a huge following, and thousands of letters were written to her over the years. Unexpectedly, but seemingly the norm in much of today’s print media experience, the magazine was suddenly shut down again.
“The magazine folded, and I folded,” she says. “I got into my pajamas and stayed in them for a year.” The staff was told the news on a Monday and had to be out by Friday, just before the holidays in November of 2007. It was totally unexpected. “The first thing I did was get everybody a job elsewhere,” says Browning, who quickly found consulting work at New York Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. She sold her home in Pelham, N.Y., where she raised her two sons. (One of her earlier books, Paths of Desire, is about that particular home and its garden.) She moved from New York to Rhode Island, to a rural home she had kept for 25 years. Neglect and structural damage had weakened it. “The house collapsed, the magazine collapsed, I folded,” she reiterates the metaphor.
Not surprisingly, Browning’s recovery began with gardening. And soon she started writing and typing again. Then, several weeks after “the calamity,” a strange thing happened: she could not type the letter “i.” The word “think,” for example, would come out “thnk.” A subconscious desire to avoid herself? “I thought, ‘Forget it, I can’t do this anymore. I clearly should not be writing.’ So I stopped,” she says. Then, in the summer of 2008, a flood of writing took place, and Browning started a new book to bring herself up to date. Slow Love, How I got knocked off the fast track, put on pajamas for a year, and found happiness, coming out in May 2010, was the result. It’s a cathartic and poetic blend of loss and recovery, mourning and reinvention.
“Everybody always has a list of what they want to do. Don’t put things off,” Browning says of the upcoming book’s overriding message. It took two years to write, and it covers the years since the magazine closed, during which she lost also a seven-year-long love, and moved and reinvented herself as a freelance writer, something unknown and scary and exciting to her, she says. She calls the book, “freer and wackier, much more embarrassing” than her previous works. She frequently writes in longhand: “I always have notebooks and refer back to them,” she says. “I keep journals and diaries….” These days, she also uses her computer.