Exclusive Interview: Josie Adams Reveals Untold Secrets Behind We Thought They’d Never Leave with Tony Shalhoub
MDH: When your publisher pushed you to try something different, you decided to add card game rules and lists, and all sorts of different things other than straight prose. Can you tell me about arriving at that structure, and was there anything you really loved that you had to cut?
JA: We didn’t want this to feel like a dense, heavy book. We wanted it to have a sense of lightness and humor to it as well. And I think we achieved that partially because of not sticking to this rigid essay format in every chapter. Card games are really important to our family, and if you’re writing a book about our family, you cannot write a book without our favorite card games. So we had all these ideas for what could go into the book. We had to whittle down our recipes to our top 20. Each recipe sparks a memory, a feeling, or is on heavy rotation at our reunion. For the stories, I asked my dad when he thinks of his childhood and growing up, what are the first memories that come to him? We took it from there.
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