Slow love: How I lost my job, put on my pajamas & found happiness, by Dominique Browning

The author, former editor of House and Garden, finds herself unexpectedly in the ranks of the unemployed when publisher Conde Nast pulls the plug on the magazine with no notice. World-wide financial collapse follows closely behind, leaving the author reeling with insecurities of all kinds. She has just ended a seven year relationship with "Stroller," as she names him, a not-quite-divorced, not-quite-married man whose ambivalence towards commitment of any kind is a central leitmotif of the book. After a spell of sleeping almost non-stop is followed by its opposite, total insomnia, she finally begins to pick up the pieces of her life, sells her "forever house" and moves to a former summer cottage in Rhode Island; learns to live alone; begins to write again; and finds peace in gardening. This memoir/how-to book is well-written but overly self-involved. I couldn't imagine why anyone would stay seven months, let alone years, with "Stroller," so named because he intermittently strolls in and out of her life, whose main attractions seem to be "endearing striped socks," and that he likes ironing. 271 pp.