Dominique Browning is looking out the bedroom window of her house on the coast of Rhode Island.
“I can see across to a marsh pond,” she reports over the phone. “Then there’s a barrier beach. And then the sea.”
She is wearing clothes as comfortable as pyjamas.
She is 54, a mother of two sons, 25 and 21.
She is divorced.
She is single.
She is no longer the editor-in-chief of Condé Nast’s U.S. edition of House & Garden. She lost that job in November, 2007, when the magazine folded.
She tells you everything – if you give her a pause to fill. She has written a book, her fourth: Slow Love: How I Lost my Job, Put on my Pajamas
Ms. Browning was facing a cruel irony. After masterfully juggling a busy life at home and at work, fulfilling the have-it-all exhortation of her generation, she suddenly found herself with nothing at all, wondering what it had all been for.
The career had gone. So had the children – grown and out of the house. The 10-year marriage to the father of her children was long since over. And she was realizing that a decades-long on-again off-again relationship with a man she calls Stroller – she was going to call him Walker, because he was good at walking away, until he gave her the pseudonym he preferred – was never going to amount to the love she wanted.
In fact, she was beginning to see that she had an unfortunate thing for unavailable men – Stoller was separated from his wife, but refused to divorce her and still, on occasion, took her out – and maybe that was because she didn’t feel she was deserving of a good, committed relationship.
And something else: Maybe she had put up with Stoller’s ambivalence because a fractious relationship was better than no relationship at all. Maybe, like many women, she had a fear of being alone.
Oh yes, Ms. Browning was putting her hands on what could be called the successful woman’s wobbly bits. Nothing was holding them in any more. Distractions had peeled off like Spanx
“I started thinking I needed to figure out why I was so dismayed about losing my job,” she says. “And I ended up feeling that what I needed to think about is this midlife passage I’m in. Because all the wheels are falling off the wagon, not just work. It’s that I have to think about health, mortality, motherhood, being a partner, creativity, all those things.”
She breathes, silent for a moment, and you let the quietness linger. “It’s not feeling needed anywhere,” she confesses after a long pause, “which leads to not feeling loveable, not feeling wanted, and then the real work began when I started thinking about what does it mean to feel needed and what do I need.”
She realized she had to take a leap into the void, to make a change. Partly, her age – she was then just crossing the threshold into her 50s – demanded courage for something new. “Almost deliberately you have to say, ‘I’m going to keep growing, keep active, because I could see how easy it is to kind of hold still.’ ”
She sold what she had thought would be her forever house, purchased and refurbished after her 10-year marriage ended, in a suburb of New York and downsized to Rhode Island, a three-hour train ride from the hurly-burly of Manhattan.
