The memoir, titled We Thought They’d Never Leave: Musings on Food and Family, recounts the father’s childhood in a Lebanese‑American household of ten children in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and is structured around the family’s annual reunion.
To produce the book, the daughter, a former copywriter and current production‑company founder, spent a year writing in the first‑person voice of her father, a man in his seventies who spent his career as an actor and executive producer.
Their collaborative process began with a list of stories the father wanted to tell; he then drafted them while the daughter supplied prompts and later edited, expanded, and rearranged the material, often working on chapters remotely.
Both contributors credit complementary strengths: the father’s natural storytelling and detailed memory, and the daughter’s ability to manage large projects and edit for clarity, a skill honed during a decade of brand copywriting.
The book also includes twenty family recipes, reflecting the duo’s aim to fuse culinary tradition with personal history, and underscores the challenges of writing another person’s lived experience while preserving authentic voice.