Memoirs of Sir John Reresby. Edited by Andrew Browning. » 10 Jul » The Spectator Archive

Dialogue Tips on technique 5: Plot Tips on technique 6: Tense Tips on technique 7: Think of all the people you know and ask yourself how many are normal. In fact you're probably the most normal of the lot and, let's face it, even you're not that normal.

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume l

All normal people believe they are a little bit different, a little bit unique and a little bit special. On the other hand no one wants to be abnormal, so it's a fine line to tread. Happily, this brilliantly funny book shows everyone exactly how to be uniquely normally normal.

Is it normal to: Find out the answers to these and a million other perfectly normal questions in another beautifully funny, surprisingly wise and consistently heart-warming book from the best-selling Guy Browning.

Memoirs of Sir John Reresby. Edited by Andrew Browning.

Browning has just published a memoir about losing her job and shedding her old identity; it's called Slow Love and, after reading it, all I can think is: Frances Palmer hide caption. Especially to the nearly 10 percent of Americans who are currently out of work, Browning's memoir will read like a luscious fantasy of unemployment. Browning recounts how she sold her beloved home outside New York City; moved permanently into her newly renovated vacation house by the sea in Rhode Island; and threw herself into gardening, Bible reading and mastering the Goldberg Variations on her piano.

The subtitle of Browning's memoir underscores its privileged class perspective. Taken on its own terms, Slow Love is a compelling and often funny addition to that burgeoning literary subset of autobiography: The most wince-making sections of Slow Love are devoted to Browning's long love affair with the legally separated-but-married man she calls "Stroller," because he strolls away at crucial moments.


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Browning astutely diagnoses but remains in thrall to Stroller's "weirdly intoxicating potion of loving unavailability. Browning, who feels as though she's being banished from paradise, describes her response as "the derangement of a howling Eve.

Blitzed

Yet this dance of romantic ambivalence continues until the spell is weakened by Browning's cancer and the months that follow -- months of unhurried, focused attention to family and friends, her own body and nature. Browning calls this shift in focus "slow love," which she says is "about knowing what you've got before it's gone.

Browning identifies as a feminist and she's careful -- in this ode to "slow love" and her new, nature-saturated, domestic life in Rhode Island -- not to fall into the reactionary posture of condemning her past life as a working mother.