The essay analyzes the shaping of the story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, leaning on Carver’s early draft “Beginners”, which was reissued in 2007 as part of a wider project of publishing the ‘unedited’ stories of Raymond Carver. My aim in this essay is to identify the major changes that Carver’s draft underwent in the hands of Knopf editor and Carver’s friend Gordon Lish, before being published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). My textual analysis of such radical changes (omissions, rewriting, a different ending) shows the nature and extent of Lish’s editing. Lish clearly aimed at expelling any sentimentality and most psychological introspection, highlighting the story’s bleaker tones. In the end, the edited version reads like a different story, and “Beginners” carries to the reader a less-minimalist Carver.