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often); and “Mum” when she was jotting
down something mundane in her diary,
with little feeling attached to the event
she was describing. On one occasion,
when Lara receives reciprocated love
from her perennially distracted guard-
ian, she calls her “Mumma-Mum.”
As I delved deeper and deeper into
the defense of my protagonist’s syntax,
I was surprised to find how much I loved
the copyediting
process, once I
repositioned it
in my brain as a
championship of
sorts. I decided to
call my copy edi-
tor to tell her how
much I was enjoy-
ing reading her
queries. It was the
first time Anne
had ever received
a phone call from
the author of a
manuscript she’d
already edited.
My conversa-
tion with my copy
editor—and her surprise that we were
having one—inspired me to get in touch
with the copy editors of other contem-
porary work that I admired. “I wonder
whether editors realize what kind of
contribution copy editors could be mak-
ing if they were allowed more contact
with the authors,” said veteran copy edi-
tor Mark Handsley, who was the manag-
ing copy editor at the London office of
Penguin Books for decades before going
freelance sixteen years ago. “The copy
editors are completely divorced from
the author today, and I think that’s a
complete shame. There is a territorial
instinct; editors think, ‘This is my book;
I’ve been dealing with the author, and I
don’t want someone interfering.’”
We were discussing Handsley’s ex-
perience copyediting Guy Gunaratne’s
prize-winning In Our Mad and Furious
City (MCD x FSG Originals, 2018), a
book I’d much admired that presents
a snapshot of modern-day London via
a collage of vernacular voices from the
city’s streets. Handsley admitted that
he’d initially found the book “quite dif-
ficult to read” until he slipped into its
rhythm, at which point, he turned into
the guardian of its style. “I don’t want the
reader to be given pause in the way that
I might have been when I was working
on the book,” Handsley said. “Whether
it’s vocabulary or tone—even if it’s
only for a few moments and the reader
is able to ignore
the inconsistency
and carry on,
there shouldn’t
be cause for that
kind of problem.
The copy editor’s
job is to smooth
out those prob-
lems and get rid
of them so that
the process is
i nv isible.”
One thing that
surprised me dur-
ing my quest to
speak to copy edi-
tors of my favorite
wild books is that
some of these books didn’t have copy
editors at all. Eimear McBride’s A Girl
Is a Half-Formed Thing (Coffee House
Press, 2014) didn’t even have a line-
editing pass, and Matthew McIntosh’s
iconoclastic theMystery.Doc (2017) was
acquired by Grove Atlantic already
type-set, definitively “as is.”
“I had spent a lot of time editing,
myself, so I was confident when I sent
it that it was exactly what I wanted to
publish,” McIntosh explained via e-mail
about the copyediting process for his
1,660-page novel, edited—or rather,
acquired—by Morgan Entrekin. “I
was fortunate that Morgan agreed and
didn’t want to change anything. I’ve
been told that this is rare. The manu-
script needed proofing—spelling, some
punctuation, the odd incorrect word
choice— but as far as the larger issues of
editing, the book was published pretty
much just as it had been sent in.”
theMystery.doc was actually copyedited
by Matthew’s wife, Erin, but in this bookAs I delved deeper and
deeper into the defense of my
protagonist’s syntax, I was
surprised to find how much I
loved the copyediting process,
once I repositioned it in my
brain as a championship
of sorts.