My story, writes Dominique Browning, the editor in chief of House & Garden, "is about the way a house can express loss, and then bereavement, and then, finally, the rebuilding of a life." Around the House and in the Garden is a moving narrative, culled from Browning's much-loved monthly editorial column, about the solace and sense of self that can be found through tending to one's home. From building a high stone wall in the garden to learning that every kitchen deserves a good kitchen couch, Browning reminds us that making a home is more than just a materialistic endeavor -- it is a way for us to comfort and reinvent ourselves, to "have the final word about what goes where...what feels comfortable, what is life enhancing...and gives us strength to go out and embrace the world." The New York Times Book Review Browning has an unerring gift for capturing revelatory events. Chicago Tribune Reinvention -- of home and self -- is at the heart of this simple yet elegant book. Browning's gift is telling her story of failed love through her feelings about household objects and daily routines, showing how her heart, her home, and her garden begin to heal. Cheryl Mendelson, author of Home Comforts Browning describes more eloquently than anyone else how our homes shape and support and change with our lives....This is a wonderful book. Detroit Free Press Browning's voice and style are personal, good-humored, and evocative....To paraphrase her own words, she tended the house and garden for years. In the end, she finds, the house and garden took good care of her. Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of Simple Abundance [Browning] shares her unique and appealing blend of warmth, wit, and domestic wisdom, and the result is moving and personal as well as useful and inspiring. Jay McInerney author of Bright Lights, Big City and Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar Anyone who has ever owned a house, planted a bulb, or lost a lover should read this book....Beautiful, haunting, and inspiring. Dominique Browning is the editor in chief of House & Garden. She lives in New York with her two teenage sons. Around the House and in the Garden A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing, and Home Improvement By Dominique Browning Scribner Copyright © 2003 Dominique Browning All right reserved. ISBN: 0743226933 What's It All About? When I was divorced my sense of home fell apart. And so, too, did my house. The rooms looked ravaged, sacked as they were of furniture, art, books, the mementos of a life constructed with someone else; everything fallen into disrepair. For a long time I couldn't bring myself to buy new furniture. I couldn't replaster and repaint; it took too much energy even to consider choosing colors. Except for the children's rooms, I wanted everything to be clean, but empty, redolent of failed love. I was very, very sad. I went through days, months, and maybe even years fully able to be a good mother, and to be a friend, and to work -- in fact, taking comfort in the time-consuming distraction of it as well as in the structure the job's demands gave to my days. It was only my house -- disheveled, lonely-looking, pale, and crumbling -- that showed the symptoms of my uneasiness in my new life. I am a slowpoke, in some profound ways, and always have been. Some people bounce quickly out of divorce into new relationships, new marriages, and new houses; lucky for them, I say. But it took me years to renovate my attitude, and it was a messy job, proceeding in fits and starts. So there is no chronology in the writing that follows; there was no narrative to my heartbreak or my healing. Just a starting point -- but maybe not even that, as divorce, or any kind of suffering, usually does not seem like the beginning of anything, just the end of something. Strangely enough, my divorce came through when I was starting a new job as the editor of House & Garden, a magazine about making homes. Nothing in my professional background could have prepared me for this subject; I had worked at magazines like Newsweek and Texas Monthly and Esquire, which, if they have anything to do with home, say so only indirectly. Maybe because I was now making a living thinking about houses, I was more self-conscious about the state of my own home. But because I was so intensely busy with the magazine, I didn't have to press myself actually to do anything about it. I lived vicariously, in other people's tailored, well-appointed rooms, surrounded by their beautiful things. Whatever I was looking for I found in photographs that seemed always to capture domestic perfection. So long as the children were comfortable, I felt free to go my own, slow, meditative way in pulling things back together. My children saw that their house -- one of their houses -- looked strange, but they were graciously, instinctively generous in their acceptance of it. I began to pay close attention to how people talk about making homes, whether the