Book Launch: The Tale of the Wooden Spoon, by Edgar Seikaly

In 2018 I sat down to write an autobiographical reflection that was also a cookbook. I thought I knew what the book was about. I was wrong.
A book, like a life, cannot be finished before the journey it is describing is complete. And my journey was not complete. Not even close.

What happened between 2018 and 2026 changed my understanding of humanity in ways I did not anticipate and could not have planned. Eight years that brought me back, in the most unexpected ways, to the years between 1976 and 1984. The Beirut kitchen. The wooden spoon. The boy who left and did not yet know who he was becoming or why.

Those two periods, separated by four decades, turned out to be the same period. The same questions. The same search. The same return.

The Tale of the Wooden Spoon is what emerged from that recognition. It is not the book I set out to write in 2018. It is the book that was waiting for me to live enough of my life to deserve writing it.

Every great journey, I believe, starts at home and ends at home. What happens in between are not detours. They are the education. The shaping. The slow and sometimes painful process of becoming someone the journey was always trying to make you.  

I am home now. The book is done. And what she held together will remain.