For the past few years, my father and I have been collaborating on a book—a memoir articulated from his own voice. It has pushed me to undertake something I never imagined I would do as a professional: mimic the distinctive cadence of Tony Shalhoub. Yet I’m not emulating the public figure everyone recognizes. Not Adrian Monk, the meticulous detective from eight seasons of Monk, nor Abe Weissman, the frazzled father in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The other Tony Shalhoub—the one I know personally: my father.
To be fair, I’m not entirely unseasoned for this. As a child I spent countless hours mimicking my father’s signature. He learned handwriting from nuns, and the result is a signature that’s clear, orderly, each stroke consistently slanted. I repeated it until I could counterfeit it well enough to sign his headshots on occasion—and, when needed, to sign my own permission slips too.
Our volume, We Thought They’d Never Leave: Musings on Food and Family, is a culinary memoir recounting my father’s upbringing in a Lebanese-American clan of ten siblings in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The narrative centers on our yearly family gathering and incorporates twenty cherished recipes from our kin. Crafting it compelled me to place myself inside his recollections, his bonds, and his view of life. For twelve months I inhabited the mindset of a woman in her thirties trying to think and write as a man in his seventies—a man who also happened to be my father.
Ultimately, the work revolves around kin, memory, and customs, so collaborating felt fitting.
When I was a child, I drafted episode outlines for favorite programs such as Friends, Gilmore Girls, and Will & Grace by hand. I also craft fiction, conjuring characters whose inner workings feel so real that I sometimes forget they aren’t real people. In my twenties and early thirties I worked as a professional copywriter, earning a living for more than a decade by sounding convincing on behalf of brands from small online startups to major tech companies. What I hadn’t done before co-writing this book with my father was to tell another person’s life in the first person, let alone someone so closely linked to me.
Before we started drafting side by side, I carried a few worries. Would we take edits personally? Might disputes about the prose morph into tensions between a parent and child? I’m familiar with how “constructive criticism” from someone you adore can feel like an attack on your character. Yet our collaboration proved more seamless than I expected, even when we weren’t sharing the same space.
Here’s how it unfolded: we sat down to sketch the episodes he wished to share, after which he would draft them on his own. I supplied prompts—precise recollections or events I hoped to explore. This wasn’t a simple interview and transcription project; we were co-authoring, and from the outset we intended that joint process to shape the book’s character. After all, the subject centers on family, memory, and tradition, so a collaborative creation felt fitting.
When he forwarded pages—occasionally nearly polished narratives, other times rough drafts—I would dive in while he pressed on to the subsequent section. I trimmed, rearranged, penned fresh passages, fleshed out scenes, and expanded fragments that began as mere lines. I’ve long been adept at keeping vast projects in view, mapping how disparate ideas interlock and how individual anecdotes contribute to a bigger narrative. My father, a gifted raconteur, possesses an exceptional recall for people, dialogue, and those minute particulars that give a moment its texture. We soon found that our talents complemented one another.
We also share a comparable work approach. We acknowledged strong ideas, welcomed necessary revisions, and maintained momentum. I think the ease of our dynamic stems from a lack of preciousness on both sides. I spent years as a copywriter receiving feedback and shaping others’ work, and now run a production firm centered on writing and development, where teamwork is vital. My father spent his career as an actor and executive producer, absorbing and dispensing notes, recognizing when to push back and when to yield. We both recognized that the aim was to improve the book and, crucially, to hit our deadlines.
Yet the more I wrote about these people through my father’s perspective, the more I realized there were details I understood about them that he didn’t share in quite the same way.
I also pondered how an actor can perform lines penned by another while preserving the truth of the delivery. In literary nonfiction, voice and authorship intertwine more intricately. We typically assume the speaker of the first-person pronoun is the author behind the sentence. In our memoir, the experiences belong to my father, yet the phrasing sometimes comes from me. We co-authored, but every instance of “I” points to him.
I had a leg up in impersonating him: I’ve spent most of my life listening to his voice. I recognize his gestures, his humor, the distinctive cadence of his storytelling. I could usually sense when something sounded like him and when it didn’t. Yet knowing a person’s voice doesn’t automatically grant access to their lived experience. I know how my father talks about life, but not necessarily how he lived through it.
In fiction, I can craft a character’s recollections and determine their meanings. Crafting my father’s memoir demanded a different kind of imagination. I could sculpt a moment, develop a persona, or uncover the words for an event, yet I could not decide its actual occurrence or significance for him. I was handling someone else’s memories, with that person waiting on the other end of the line to correct me when needed. Still, I carried a long history with him to draw from, and frequently I could sense his intended meaning even before he found the exact phrasing.
Growing up involves learning to view our parents as individuals with lives that extend beyond us. They carried hopes, disappointments, and relationships that existed well before us. This is an intellectual realization that often precedes its emotional grasp. Part of me will always see my dad as my dad—the person he has always been to me. Yet at age thirty-six, composing this memoir allowed me to perceive him more completely as a person with a life that started long before mine. I had to picture him not just as my father but as someone’s son, a brother, a boy whose life didn’t yet include me. Sometimes I recognized the adult I’m used to in the boy he portrayed; other times the boy read as entirely unfamiliar. I was reading his life as if it were literature, demanding a different kind of attention from simply being his daughter.
Pronouns sometimes felt especially odd. I’d type “my mother,” but really I meant my grandmother. I’d type “my father,” referring to a man I’d never met. I’d write “my brothers and sisters” about relatives I knew as aunts and uncles. Yet in the memoir, they appeared as children, and I was writing about them as their sister. I had to envision familiar people in roles I’d never seen them play.
Yet the more I wrote from my father’s frame of reference, the more I recognized insights about them that he may not have understood in the same fashion. His memories reflect one generation, while my grasp of the same individuals stems from a different era.
Across the pages, I aimed to view the world through my father’s perspective, while also weaving in my own experiences—often without fully intending to.
Both of my paternal grandparents passed away before I came into the world. I’ve never heard them speak or seen them physically present, save for a few rare recordings. Yet I’ve spent my life among their offspring, savoring the dishes they taught their children to cook and absorbing the tales that sustain their memory in subsequent generations. All I know about my grandparents is filtered through those who survived them.
In a chapter titled “The Hard Way,” my father recounts his mother Helen questioning how her offspring inherited traits she herself couldn’t see in herself. It pierced me to hear him describe her insecurity, understanding from the lore I’d heard that she perhaps never realized how much of what she admired in her children originated with her own influence.
As I shaped that chapter, I felt compelled to respond to her in some way. I knew those children—my aunts and uncles by now. I recognized their generosity, humor, and warmth, and I knew how they spoke of their mother. I’d heard how they credited her for the very traits she herself didn’t recognize. Consequently, I inserted that sentiment in my father’s voice, telling Helen that the traits she admired in her offspring were rooted in her own influence.
When my father read it, tears came to his eyes. He asked how I could know his mother so intimately without having met her. He was grateful to have the chance to convey those words to her, even if only on the page. I struggled to articulate how I knew what to write. Although I never met Helen, writing as her son somehow granted me a channel to speak to her.
Across the narrative, I strove to view life through my father’s perspective while infusing my own experience, often unknowingly. It was almost uncanny how our viewpoints could converge: I could name memories not my own and, in the process, illuminate insights neither of us had fully grasped before.
I began with the aim of channeling my father, only to realize that the most significant contribution to his voice was simply my own perspective.
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We Thought They’d Never Leave, a memoir co-authored by Tony Shalhoub with Josie Adams, is published by Gallery Books.
