Josie Adams Spent a Year Forging Her Father Tony Shalhoub's Literary Voice

Tony Shalhoub's next role is a book, and his daughter wrote half of it. We Thought They'd Never Leave: Musings on Food and Family, published by Gallery Books, is a culinary memoir co-written by Shalhoub and his daughter Josie Adams, told entirely in his first-person voice. Adams, a former professional copywriter, spent roughly a year channeling a man in his seventies while being a woman in her thirties. Her father, in this case, was the man she calls "the other" Tony Shalhoub — not Adrian Monk, not Abe Weissman.

The book traces Shalhoub's childhood in a Lebanese-American family of ten children in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It is structured around the family's annual reunion and includes twenty favorite family recipes. Adams frames the project as a natural extension of a family skill. "As a kid, I practiced forging my father's signature endlessly," she writes, noting that his nun-taught penmanship — legible, methodical, every letter at the same disciplined angle — was good enough for the occasional headshot and, when circumstances required, her own permission slips.

How does a father-daughter ghost-writing partnership actually work?

Not through interviews, Adams is firm on that. The pair first listed the stories Shalhoub wanted to tell; he then wrote them, responding to prompts from his daughter about specific memories. She edited his pages — cutting, rearranging, writing new passages, expanding scenes that began as a few sentences — while he moved on to the next chapter. "We were writing it together, and from the beginning, we wanted that collaboration to be part of the book's identity," she writes. Given the subject — family, memory, tradition — she finds the method fitting.

The division of labor played to separate strengths. Adams describes herself as good at holding large projects in her head and seeing how unrelated ideas connect. Her father, she says, is "a natural storyteller, with an extraordinary memory for people, dialogue, and the small details that bring a scene to life." Both careers prepared them: hers in copywriting and a production company focused on writing and development; his as an actor and executive producer used to taking and giving notes. Neither, she suspects, is particularly precious. The goal was to make the book better — and, critically, meet deadlines.

What happens when the 'I' on the page isn't the writer?

Here the essay sharpens. Actors deliver other people's dialogue without compromising authenticity, Adams observes; literary nonfiction (writing that claims to be factually true) allows no such clean split. "We tend to assume that the person saying 'I' is also the person who wrote the sentence," she writes. "In our book, the experiences belong to my father, but the words sometimes belong to me." Knowing his voice wasn't the same as knowing his experience: she knows how he talks about the world, not how he lived it. In fiction she could invent memories and decide what they meant; here she couldn't, and the man who could correct her was on the other end of the phone.

The pronouns produced their own strangeness. Typing "my mother" meant her grandmother; "my brothers and sisters" meant her aunts and uncles, imagined as children. The essay's pivot comes in the chapter "The Hard Way," where Shalhoub recalls his mother, Helen, wondering how her children acquired qualities she didn't recognize in herself. Both of Shalhoub's parents died before Adams was born. Drawing on a lifetime among their children, she wrote an answer to Helen into the chapter — in her father's voice, telling her that the qualities she admired came from her. Shalhoub cried when he read it, and wondered how his daughter could have known his mother so well without meeting her.

Her verdict on the whole enterprise is characteristically neat: "I had set out to pretend to be my father, only to discover that the most meaningful thing I could bring to his voice was my own." At thirty-six, she says, the book let her read her father's life as literature — and see the boy who existed long before the daughter.