I was having lunch with an agent, Tracy Bohan, when I first heard about We Don’t Know What We’re Doing. She told me she’d taken on a brilliant young writer called Thomas Morris, that she was about to send out his first book, that he was Welsh but living in Dublin – and that the book was a short story collection.
There are many myths that circulate about the publishing industry – that editors no longer edit, that you have to be attractive to get a book deal, that putting “Girl” in the title of your novel is guaranteed to make it a success – none of which has much basis in truth. But the often repeated allegation that “short story collections are impossible to publish/get published” isn’t a myth. It is a widely acknowledged truth across the industry that making an impact with short story collections, however distinctive, is very hard.
So for all that I liked the sound of this Welsh talent, it was with a slightly sinking feeling that I told the agent that I’d love to see the collection.
The manuscript came in by email later that afternoon along with a letter from the agent. She mentioned that the stories were set in Caerphilly, all within sight of its eponymous castle. I grew up about 15 minutes from Caerphilly and visited it on junior school trips, sometimes at weekends with my parents and also once in 1977 when the queen drove past in a cavalcade for her silver jubilee. It was a place that I hadn’t thought about for a long time.
In my 13 years as an editor at Faber, I’d never been sent a book set in south Wales. Rugged Wales – yes; historical Wales – yes; but faded, chippy south Wales, the Wales that I grew up in: never. I was curious to see what he’d done with the place.
I put the kids to bed that night, lay down on the floor of my bedroom and started reading. The first story in the collection was Bolt. In it, a young man is working in a video shop in Caerphilly having split up from his girlfriend.
“Oh here we go,” I thought. “A young man from Caerphilly is writing about the pain of a young man from Caerphilly – in the present tense. My heart bleeds.”
But then the story becomes an unpredictable and beautifully imagined encounter between this young man and an older woman, the town’s only psychiatrist. The next story was about a teacher in his thirties, ostensibly happily married, who feels like he’s not really living his life. And then one about a young woman coming back from her first term at university and feeling caught between her old life and her new self, then one about a single mum struggling to hold herself together, then a story about a pensioner who plucks up the courage to ask a beautiful woman on a date.
The range of characters – age, gender, sexuality, circumstance – was extraordinary. Their feelings and their worries rang true. I didn’t see the writer’s fingerprints on any of them. How did he know all of these people? What a gift to be able get inside the heads and hearts of men and woman of all ages, to imagine and articulate their predicaments. I was moved and impressed and excited.
And while the characters in all of the stories seemed to be struggling to connect and to feel loved, reading the book made me feel less alone. Isn’t this the measure of great writing, when it speaks to you intimately through characters and makes you feel connected? I think of the work of Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro and Anton Chekhov. And this is how I felt when I finished Tom’s book.
When you come across the real thing, the whole issue of form disappears. The job is to get the writer onto the list. I shared the stories with colleagues at Faber and made my offer. After a funny conversation with Tom on the phone, we got the book.
It’s an editor’s dream to find a writer like Tom – who has such a distinct talent, whose work actually feels relevant and consoling. It’s been a thrill to see so many readers and reviewers fall in love with these stories – and to imagine what might come next.
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris is published by Faber, at £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount to Irish Times Book Club readers.
Morris is editor of The Stinging Fly magazine and edited Dubliners 100, a Tramp Press collection of stories updating James Joyce’s original to mark its centenary.
