How To Make A Career Telling Other People What To Do: An Interview with Doubleday Editor Thomas Gebremedhin

I think we have a kind of moral obligation as editors, as agents, to put out into the world books that reveal the plurality of human experiences and books that challenge readers

The first book Thomas Gebremedhin acquired as a newbie editor at Doubleday, Hua Hsu’s memoir STAY TRUE, won the Pulitzer Prize. This is a fact I like to lead with whenever I introduce him because it’s true and I’m that kind of friend. Before coming to Doubleday, Thomas worked in the magazine world for many years before returning to our side of things, though as you’ll see from the below, he’s a book guy at heart. I spoke to him to give readers a sense of the full scope of a book editor’s role as well as how this one particular editor approaches his job. Read on if you are interested in

· What Thomas looks for in a submission

· How he likes to work with writers

· Thomas’s thoughts on the editorial capacities we all share, and what sets editors apart from other mortals

· The vexed question of “Do editors really edit?”

· Finding out Thomas’s favorite literary heroine

Enjoy! And if you like learning about how editors work, I highly recommend my OG client Merve Emre’s series on “The Art of Editing” from her podcast “The Critic and Her Publics.”

How did you get your start as an editor?

I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I got my degree in fiction. Straight out of Iowa, I knew I wanted to move to New York, but I didn’t have the money to do so without a job lined up. Fortunately, something opened at Vogue, and I started working there as a features assistant and then started writing for the front of book section.

I was there for about a year and a half, and then this opportunity opened up to work for Tim Duggan, who was starting his own imprint at Crown. I love books, I love prose, and I'd heard wonderful things about Tim, so I made the jump, and that was my first taste of book editing. It was a wonderful, enriching experience. It was very much an apprenticeship.

I was going to ask about your own apprenticeship era. How in your own experience did you learn to edit books? What does that look like?

I have a philosophy that anyone can be an editor. When you're reading a book, opinions form. You either feel like this character's motivations are false, or the plot kind of is slow. And of course, it’s always subjective, but everyone has instincts. The thing about editors is we just think so highly of ourselves that we’re willing to make a career telling people what to do.

With Tim, he would often have us edit a project simultaneously, and then we'd review the manuscript together. He would tell me what he felt I nailed, what perhaps I could have delved deeper into. But again, the editing aspect was sort of innate to me. I've been a lifelong reader, and I think when you read widely, you inherently are going to have some sense for what works and what doesn't.

There are certain tricks in publishing and editing a book. For instance, I believe strongly that the opening and the ending are the most important aspects of a reading experience, so I really want to get both exactly right. I think that first sentence of any book should surprise you, make you stumble as a reader.

I worked with Tim, but afterwards I went back to magazines, this time to the Wall Street Journal magazine. That's a different kind of editing. The clip is much faster. You might be working on a magazine story for three months, whereas with books, you are working on a project for two years at minimum, and sometimes much, much longer, but the approach is the same. Who are the players in the story? How do they come off? How are the sentences? Is the structure working?

I was a culture editor at WSJ., and, after five years, I left for the Atlantic, where I was one of the senior print editors and also served as fiction editor as well. They were all very different kinds of stories. WSJ was more a luxury lifestyle publication. So there was a kind of aspirational voice to every feature. At the Atlantic, it was hard-hitting. I was working there during COVID and the first Trump administration. It was grueling, but in the best way. And then I moved back to books.

You've worked at three very different magazine publications, and they all have very distinctive tones. A Vogue article reads differently than a WSJ article. Now that you edit books, do you think that there's anything that unites the tone or the voice or the approach of your list? Is there a Thomas “house style”?

First and foremost, I would say to me, it starts with the sentences. My list is eclectic. Last week, in fact, I had a pretty well-known agent tell me that she couldn't quite grasp my tastes in fiction. And she didn't say it in a derogatory way, but it just sort of speaks to the diversity of my interests. I have film criticism, I have essays, I have short stories, and family sagas and biography, tech, and a lot of general hybrid nonfiction. But again, it starts with the sentences.

Whether it's non-fiction or fiction, I like for there to be some sort of sense of discovery taking place. There must be a kind of uncertainty that the writer is chasing. Or else, for me, at least, the project ends up feeling lifeless.

I also want to like the characters, and in the case of non-fiction, I do consider the author to be a character no matter how present they are on the page. This doesn't necessarily mean I want to grab a drink with them. I'm speaking now obviously of characters as we typically understand them and not the writers. But it does mean that there's some kind of kinship, some personality quirks.

Last week, I had a submission that is set in contemporary London, and it features someone who is not the most sympathetic character. They will do whatever they have to do, and this was a novel, to climb the social ladder. So I compared this character in an editorial meeting to Becky Sharp from [William Thackeray’s novel] Vanity Fair.

I love a Becky Sharp.

Love Becky Sharp. Balls to the wall. She is industrious and duplicitous at times. That’s not someone that I would ever have as a friend, certainly, because you can't trust her as far as you can throw her. And yet, there's something that I really admire about her.

And importantly, Thackeray provides the context of the world in which he makes very apparent the impositions that are placed on women, on people who are not born of means, who sometimes do have to be hard-scrabble, and so you sympathize with her, regardless of how dodgy she can be. So that's an example. I also love an unreliable narrator.

I’d like to give readers a sense of how you go about considering manuscripts and proposals, but let's start with what your day looks like, and how much of your time is spent looking at submissions and how much of it is spent doing other stuff.

For me, there are sort of three kinds of days. I prefer to dedicate an entire day to submissions or editing, rather than switching between deep, focused work and routine daily tasks that may disrupt my creative flow. When I'm reading something, whether it's a submission or a book I've already bought and I'm editing, I just want to be immersed in that world, in the language of that world, in the rules of that world. If I turn to a sort of pedantic email while reading, it can just throw me off.

And then the third kind of day is the more routine stuff, and that is meetings across various departments with my colleagues—production, jacket design, publicity, other editors—which I really love. That kind of collaboration is quite an education as well. That third kind of day also has lunches and dinners with agents such as yourself or writers I'm trying to impress, or booksellers, and then emails, emails, emails, like everyone else in the world.

I think you have a sense of the kind of books that catch your eye. I'd love to talk about if there's books that you see, or a type of book or an approach that you just know isn't for you. When do you know? How quickly do you decide? Are there certain ticks that you see? What is a pass for you?

I'm beating the same drum, but again, it does come down to the sentences, which is subjective. And when I say the sentences, I mean I have books on my list that are incredibly lyrical but there are also books on my list that are a little chilly and pared back in terms of the prose itself, but the voiceis consistent, and it is in line with the tone of the book.

I often say that style and form are just as important to me as plot or a provocative thesis, because I think they go hand in hand for a reader in terms of how much a book will eventually resonate with them. They might understand a book, but when you're reading, there's a kind of emotional metabolization that's going on as well, and I think that comes down to the choices writers make stylistically. I just don't like poorly written books.

I do have writer's guilt. I don't really write as often as I once did, but I know how hard it is to write. I know how hard it is to write, and I want to give everything a fair shot. Realistically, if something is not working, I can get about 15 to 20 pages in and just know that it's not for me. And maybe it's not that it's not working, it's just not for me.

But then there are those submissions that I am compelled to continue reading, and that's always a good sign. Even if I'm in the other room, I can sort of feel this magnetic pull of a stack of papers on my desk in my office.

I always know that something really works if the pleasure it gives me is the same pleasure I get for things I don't read for work.

Totally.

It seems really obvious, but the part of my brain that is just someone who loves to read—to bring that to my job, if I'm thinking 100% about selling, then there's no magic to it.

For me it’s when I find that I’m still thinking about the book once I’ve left it behind. Even if you have issues with the books or the proposal, but you're wrangling with them while you're on a walk, I think that's indicative of some kind of power that the manuscript has over you.

So given that you're such a style fiend, can you give examples of books where you think the style is superb? It could be classics; it could be books that you haven't worked on yourself.

Amy Hempel is just masterful. I first read her around 2007 when Scribner published the collected stories. I just had never encountered storytelling like that—there was a kind of withholding that feels like an interaction that you might have with a person where they're saying one thing, but their eyes are saying another thing, and you have to parse it. There are things happening between the sentences, behind the sentences. And also, she is just very, very funny on the line, which I think is incredibly hard to do.

Jamaica Kincaid is a beautiful, soulful writer. Whether she's writing in the first person or the third, Lucy is just remarkable in terms of a voice. Autobiography of My Mother has one of the most killer first sentences ever.

In terms of nonfiction, I would say I really love Anne Truitt. She wrote this trilogy of books about artistry and her creative practice, and just growing up. I'm trying to think of who else. Anne Petry I really like, too. I discovered her when I found The Street.

I guess, not to be trite, but that's all women. I tend to identify more with female writers than male writers. But if I must throw in some guys, Cormac McCarthy obviously has a very distinct sensibility. Blood Meridian remains one of my favorite books of all time, although it's so bleak and unrelenting and just hopeless. John Edgar Wideman I adore, especially his nonfiction.

They're all varied in terms of thematic preoccupation and style, but they are consistent, and they reach me somewhere deep inside, not just intellectually, but again, on a sort of deeper level.

That's great. So as a closing question, I want to attack this preconception that editors don't edit. And the way I want to answer this question is, what you think an author can reasonably expect from their editor, and how can they best go about getting what they need from an editor?

Well, some editors don't edit, and I think that should be stated. Fortunately, I don't happen to work with any of those people, but I've had writers come to me from other houses precisely because they got no feedback, or their editors weren't responding to their emails.

I am very, very hands-on. I'm passionate about these books. I'm very selective, and so the books that I do acquire, I just lose myself in. Editing can look different for me. I take a few passes. The first pass is more macro level, so I am thinking of structure and theme—build this out here, scrap the ending and write a new one, move this chapter earlier. And then the second one is line level.

I am militant when it comes to my approach, as my writers can tell you. I do try thinking about voice; ultimately, I'm in service of their voice and their vision. I try to maintain that kind of integrity. If their writing is colloquial or playful, I try to get in that mode. But ultimately, it does come down to the sentences. I strike entire sentences, entire paragraphs. I sometimes rewrite a little bit, but again, my authors have final say. I emphasize having these meetings that take place before you acquire a book—I think of it a bit as dating. They're sort of vetting you. You're vetting them. I make clear that the buck does not stop with me. This is their book, and they have to be proud of it when they see it on shelves. I don't want them to wince, so any of my suggestions can be thrown out the window.

One of the questions you asked me was about collaboration, which I thought was useful too. I've been very fortunate to have really great collaborative partners, and that's something that I am looking for in writers. The first step is a submission. The second step is these interviews. I guess they're not interviews, but it feels like that, where I break down my process, and then we talk about the book and what's working and what's not working, because I want to see how they respond. Even if they disagree, I'm going to see how they disagree.

One person specifically that I loved working with—and I've loved working with all my writers—is Amanda Hess, who has this book coming out, Second Life, about having a child at mid-thirties. It just got a beautiful, long review in the New Yorker. And Amanda is just a lovely, lovely person. She's very generous and engages so deeply with other people and ideas. She has a keen sense for the sort of preposterousness of everyday life. She doesn't take herself too seriously.

So usually, when you read her, and this is what I loved about her proposal, despite the gravity of the subject matter, which in this case was a kind of digital identity crisis, a somewhat fraught pregnancy, she approached her experiences with this beautiful sense of humor. She's very intentional. But also, what I liked about her is that she was opinionated, and so while she was not precious, and she took a lot of my suggestions, she also said no sometimes, or told me that that was not the direction that she wanted to move in. And that's clarifying for me, especially as we continue working. And it puts me at ease too, because then I don't feel as though I've bulldozed a writer.

Is there anything else you want to say as a closing thought?

One thing about how I approach editing is, I do think we have a kind of moral obligation as editors, as agents, to put out into the world books that reveal the plurality of human experiences, books that challenge readers. I'm so tired of George Washington biographies, it's just endless. And that's how I approach my list too, which isn't to say that a book must be message-heavy, but it does have to push you as an editor, as a reader. I think you should never want to be too comfortable.

And to the writers out there, I would say, I have nothing but the utmost respect for you, and just because an editor or an agent does not sign off on your writing does not mean it's not of great value. We are gatekeepers in some way but I really try to keep an open mind when reading. Publishing is homogeneous, and you'd be surprised by the kind of lack of diversity of thought and politics and experience, lived experience. We all have our blind spots, certainly, and eventually you'll find your reader.