For the past few years, my father and I have been writing a book together, a memoir told in his first-person voice. This has required me to do something I never expected to do professionally: imitate Tony Shalhoub. But not the Tony Shalhoub most of the world knows.
Not Adrian Monk, the obsessive-compulsive detective he played for eight seasons on Monk, or Abe Weissman, the exasperated father on The Marvelous Mrs. Though, to be fair, I have some experience. As a kid, I practiced forging my father’s signature endlessly.
He learned penmanship from nuns, and his signature shows it: perfectly legible, methodical, every letter leaning at the same disciplined angle. I practiced until I could reproduce it well enough to sign the occasional headshot for him—and, when circumstances required, my own permission slips. Our book, We Thought They’d Never Leave: Musings on Food and Family, is a culinary memoir about my father’s childhood in a Lebanese-American family of ten children in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Structured around our annual family reunion, it also includes twenty of our favorite family recipes. Writing it required me to imagine myself into his memories, his relationships, and his experience of the world. For a year, I was a woman in my thirties attempting to think and write as a man in his seventies.
A man who also happened to be my father. After all, it was a book about family, memory, and tradition. There was something appropriate, then, about doing it together.
As a kid, I handwrote spec scripts for my favorite shows: Friends, Gilmore Girls, Will & Grace. I write fiction, too, inventing characters whose inner lives become so familiar to me that I sometimes forget they don’t exist. Throughout my twenties and into my early thirties, I worked as a professional copywriter, spending more than a decade getting paid to sound convincingly like brands ranging from small e-commerce startups to major tech companies.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
