"...the thingness of something becomes apparent when it is no longer functioning as it did before or it becomes dysfunctional or if it appears in an unexpected place..."
i had no idea that the work of john cheever, who as a 3- or 4-year-old was kept on a leash (“Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.) was heavily edited, and frequently radically changed (to the point where cheever would be begging him to undo some of the changes without success) by his editor, whose surname was Lish.