When Thomson sat down to read his novel “Katherine Carlyle,” the book had two endings, one of them labeled an epilogue. He was “quite proud” of this clever doubling, he said, and “felt wonderful” as he read it. When he finished, though, Gurewich “was just shaking her head and saying, ‘That doesn’t work.’” A few minutes later, one of the endings had been moved to the front of the book.

Gurewich described her interruptions as physical reactions as much as, or more than, intellectual ones. “When my stomach intervenes, I stop the reading,” she said. “I ask what happened. My job is not to interpret.” She repeatedly emphasized that she’s not there to offer specific solutions, but to identify problems.

“You have to point to the defense that’s blocking the desire,” Gurewich said. “Never put your desire in place of theirs.”

Thomson recalled the novelist and literary critic John Gardner’s maxim about the “vivid and continuous dream” of reading fiction. “I think that’s what Judith gets in touch with when she listens,” Thomson said. “If she stops me, it’s because I’ve done something to break the dream.”

As a child, Gurewich began to narrate her own life in the third person. “It’s not because I’m smart” that the editing process works, she said. “It’s because I’m incredibly primitive.” While listening to an author read a manuscript, she added, “I forget who I am. I’m gone in the text.”

“Judith made me feel both tense and relaxed at the same time,” Greenberg said. “And both the tension and the relaxation came from the quality of her attentiveness. It was self-confrontational, not confrontational between us. You would have to confront things as you would with an analyst. She would prompt you.”