I was looking forward to reading Slow Love because I was interested in what happened to Dominique Browning after Conde Naste closed Home & Garden — but the book didn’t quite live up to my expectations.
I can’t decide whether it was my expectations that were the problem or the book itself.
I expected to find, if not inspiration, at least something significant to think about and I didn’t get either of those things. Instead, I found myself wondering why I was reading a book about a smart, powerful woman wallowing around for a year after a job loss. Why I was reading a book about a smart, powerful woman in a really bad relationship that she didn’t seem to realize (or care?) was bad.
There just wasn’t anything inspiring for me. Sleep all day – no. Sell a house in the NYC suburbs and move to a second house in Rhode Island – no. Bake cookies and muffins – no. Pine away over a relationship that was never going to work out – no. The whole idea of “Slow Love”, which Browning does a good job of talking about on her blog (which I love, by the way), never really came through for me.
If I step back and think about it more as memoir and less as inspirational memoir, I like the book better – so maybe it was my expectations and not the book, after all?
Read more about Slow Love in the BlogHer Book Club and join the Slow Love discussions.