Word: breathnach
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Because there is so much self-help mush out there, journalists like me see authors like Ban Breathnach wearing a KICK ME sign. When I come to visit, she takes her own advice and snatches a small pleasure out of a potentially prickly situation: she fixes us iced tea and scones. Sitting in the living room of her comfortable brick house in a middle-class Washington suburb without a touch of wretched excess from her newfound wealth, she readily agrees to show me where she writes her first drafts, even though it's in bed. And anticipating my next line...
...July 29 and I'm going to see Sarah Ban Breathnach, whose name is pronounced Bon Brannock. She is the author of Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, a 500-page meditation to help women find fulfillment by appreciating what they already have. It has been on the best-seller list for 70 weeks, with 2.2 million copies in print. (A companion journal zoomed onto best-seller lists last month--an astonishing feat for a virtually blank book.) Simple Abundance's entry for this day is "The Home as a Hobby," in which she suggests that cleaning...
...broken toys, many of us will want a glass of something stronger than club soda, even if it's poured into the Mason jar we've just emptied of rusty nails. This is Martha Stewart for the spirit, and like the doyenne of impossibly complicated domestic arts, Ban Breathnach is exhausting in her particulars yet somehow soothing in her totality. Few devotees of Martha Stewart are going to build a Palais de Poulet, then match their wall colors to the aubergine eggs laid by her free-range chickens. And it's unlikely that Abundance's 2.2 million copies...
...Breathnach is currently at work on her next book--a real one this time, about excavating the authentic self. But first she is off to Italy for a long-awaited vacation with her daughter. In keeping with her aphorism that we are human beings, not human doings, she's not even taking her computer, having promised Katie "no work, all play...
Women who hunger for more balance in their lives but find Sarah Ban Breathnach's recipes for achieving an "authentic self" unpalatable may find greater sustenance in Elizabeth Perle McKenna's When Work Doesn't Work Anymore. Where Ban Breathnach tries to cool women's overheated lives with a sprinkling of sachets, McKenna delves deep to identify and inspect the "indigestion in [women's] souls." What emerges as the chief gastric villain is a workplace that "makes no allowance for anything to be more important than work...