The flat head of a hammerhead shark is a peculiar shape. Some scientists believe it serves as an organic metal detector that allows the shark to sweep large swathes of ocean floor with electricity detection. Most strange is the positioning of the hammerhead shark’s eyes on the sides of its flattened head. Hammerhead eyes, though far apart, have the greatest overlap in their fields of view and 360-degree vision. The hammerhead can always see above and below, even if the shark were to swim straight ahead with its head completely still. A hammerhead can improve its stereoscopic vision even further by rotating its eyes and sweeping its head from side to side. However, no matter how far or fast they turn their head, the hammerhead shark will always have a huge blind spot directly in front of them.

Many underwater animals use camouflage to avoid predators, by instantaneously changing color and shape to imitate seaweed, reef, and other animals. When danger has passed, true colors are revealed, and life continues. And then there is the stonefish. The Australian brown or grey native looks like an encrusted rock or lump of coral, sitting perfectly still on the sea floor. The stonefish is patient. They do not actively pursue prey. Their true colors are always unabashedly on display. We just choose not to look close enough. The stonefish wait, knowing that a foolish dinner will inevitably be delivered. Its venom kills quickly before swallowing the unsuspecting prey whole.

In the name of love, seahorses engage in a spectacular display of romance. The male spends days courting his truly beloved as the two swim tail in tail. This harmonious and majestic ritual helps the seahorses synchronize their movements and the couple may even change shift color between lighter and darker shades. The phenomenon of male dedication to his other half is not seen anywhere else in the animal kingdom, whereupon each morning the seahorses dance alongside one another, reaffirming their bond. Following the next new moon, some seahorses renew their courtship and stay for life. For others, it is a short affair.

Stingrays must move their whole bodies to propel through the water. Generally speaking, a stingray is content to float along and only reacts if provoked. With wide and flat bodies that flutter with the rhythm of the ocean even at a standstill, stingrays do not have a skeleton made of bones. Instead, their bodies are supported by cartilage. This makes the stingray particularly flexible but without the defenses to withstand a piercing blow. Don’t be fooled, the stingray is tough enough to be used on the cord of Japanese swords, with a tail venom that can kill humans. But without bones, the stingray ultimately disappears leaving only the faintest trail behind.

Comparative thanology. This is the fancy name for the study of animal grief. It is a young field, largely because attributing human-like behaviour to animals was largely ignored throughout the twentieth century. Wisdom of the time dictated that animals were reactive, lacking thoughts and emotions. Animals were considered to respond to stimuli as would an unthinking, unfeeling robot. Science cautioned against anthropomorphism, the naïve consideration of animals as humans dressed up in fur or feathers. Researchers who detected uniquely human emotions among animals, such as love, joy, or grief, were condescendingly typecast as anecdotal sentimentalists. But I have watched orcas travel miles balancing a dead newborn calf at the water’s surface. In some cases, the whole pod joined in, forming a protective circle around a grieving and the grieved. One need only witness such an event to understand that there is grief in the animal kingdom as certainly as there is a circle of life.

Lavender takes me straight back to the garden of the house I lived in when I was five. I remember the clothesline I used to swing on more vividly than I remember the house itself. I couldn’t tell you the street name or describe the furniture inside, but the scent of lavender brings the whole place rushing back, intact.

That idea lingered with me while writing The Spoon and the Sea: how scent survives long after names fade. In the novel, smell becomes the thread of a fragile but persistent way to hold the past together.

My husbnd Eitan inspired the habit of one of the main characters, who smells everything before he eats it, even a glass of water. At first, it seems like a quirk, something idiosyncratic or childlike. But for Eitan (and the character), smell is how he anchors himself. Because scent shapes taste, and taste shapes memory, and memory is how he orients to the world.

When my grandmother died, the only thing I took from her bedside table was a small blue tin of Nivea cream. The smell of it is her: her face, her hands, her cheek when she rested in the afternoon sun. Even now, opening the tin brings tears to my eyes. Once, during a fire in our building, we had to evacuate in a hurry. I didn’t take documents or valuables. I took the Nivea. My husband still jokes that if the building had burned down, that would’ve been our sole possession to start over with, and in a strange way, maybe that would’ve been enough.

Scent is more than memory. It’s the echo of presence and the proof that someone was here, and that we were loved.

The novel moves across continents and generations from Golders Green to British Mandate Palestine, through Zanzibar and the Gulf, and finally to Jerusalem. But the real story is much smaller: a mother, a son, and the quiet work of finding each other again after too long apart.

Some places were easier to write than others. Most obviously: Jerusalem. I live in Israel, so that part came with a certain tactile familiarity: the stone, the dry air, the noise, the way time seems layered and uneven. The scenes in the dementia care centre are fictional, but the garden there is based very specifically on one I sat in every day during my grandmother’s final weeks. I wrote it from memory, but I didn’t have to reach very far.

Other settings required more distance - sometimes historical, sometimes emotional. Writing about Zanzibar, for instance, meant reconstructing a place that no longer exists in quite the same way. My cousin Shushi was instrumental in helping paint vivid scenes from his own memories and photos. And with places like British Mandate Palestine, this is where I can geek out. In many ways I am an old soul and this is the era I was born for. It probably has a lot to do with Exodus by Leon Uris, introduced to it from the tender age of 7 because my dad is named after Ari Ben Canaan.

Yes, there’s a lot of ground covered in the novel. But in a way, I think that’s the point. The physical distances only highlight the emotional ones and the possibility of crossing them.

So maybe the book is set in all those places.
Or maybe it’s set in the space between people, and what it takes to close it.

When my manuscript was shortlisted for a major literary award, I felt something that’s hard to come by when you work in a field as fast-moving and feedback-light as tech: a deep sense of validation. Not because someone else said it was good, but because the process itself of drafting, revising, rethinking, listening had brought something into the world that could stand on its own.

There are a few lessons I’ve carried between these two worlds:

Start with what you know, then go deeper.
Writers are often told to write what they know. In tech, we say: build where you have domain expertise. In both cases, the point isn’t to limit your imagination, but to anchor it. My story began with my grandmother: her voice, her mannerisms, the way she told stories. But the real work began when I allowed myself to complicate her, to place her in conflict, to let her grow into someone new. In product terms, it’s not enough to understand the space; you have to let it challenge you, stretch you, demand more.

Be willing to abandon your favorite idea.
In my earliest drafts, I was so focused on honoring my grandmother’s memory that I lost sight of the narrative itself. One early reader (a brilliant but blunt friend) told me that while she admired the writing, the protagonist didn’t feel like a “hero,” and the story lacked tension. That feedback shook me. But it forced me to rework the entire structure, and ultimately made the book far stronger. I’ve seen the same pattern in product development countless times: a founder is convinced their initial idea is the one, but the market disagrees. The question becomes whether they can adapt, or whether their vision hardens into dogma.

Make the problem real.
For a long time, the central challenge of the book was simply that my grandmother (as I saw her) had no real flaw, no driving conflict. But stories need stakes. I had to weave in complexity, draw from history, and build a world where she would have something to struggle against. In go-to-market terms, this is where many early ideas fall short: they describe a solution, but not a problem. Without urgency, without friction, there's nothing to compel action whether from a reader, or a buyer.

Listen to feedback, even when it hurts.
I once worked with an editor who more or less fired me, saying the manuscript was too raw to be taken seriously. At the same time, others were returning it within days, telling me they couldn’t put it down. That tension between rejection and resonance is something every builder knows. The trick is learning when to trust the feedback, and when to hold your ground. In both fiction and tech, the process of filtering, absorbing, and acting on input is where the real craft lies.

Writing this novel reminded me that good work takes time - not just hours on the page, but months (and sometimes years) of rethinking, reframing, and returning to the heart of what you're trying to say. As someone who’s spent years helping others bring ideas to market, I’ve come to believe that the same skills apply whether you’re launching a company or telling a story: stay close to the problem, listen well, build with honesty, and don’t be afraid to begin again.

We were living in different countries, and for four months, we got to know each other one story at a time — over the phone, usually late at night. One of us would say a year - any year - and the other would tell a story from it. That was it. No rules, no structure, just slowly piecing together a picture of someone’s life. Sometimes the stories were funny or random, sometimes painful, sometimes surprisingly honest. It became a way of moving closer across the distance. One year at a time.

For a while, the book I was writing had a working title: Cold Hands, Warm Heart. It was something my grandma used to say, and I was attached to it for sentimental reasons. But then a beta reader told me she really loved the book, but if I didn’t change the lame title, she wouldn’t buy it. Fair enough 😂

So I started thinking about what the book is actually about - what holds it together.

At the center of it is a mother and son who are trying to reach each other after years of silence. They start playing the same game - “pick a year” - not as a cute couple thing, but as a last-ditch attempt to rebuild something real before time runs out. That game becomes their way of telling the truth, story by story, across everything that’s been left unsaid.

There’s a Yiddish proverb I came across along the way:
Mit a lefl ken men dem yam nit oys’shepn.
You can’t empty the sea with a spoon.

And yet, that’s what they’re trying to do. That’s what we all try to do when we tell the truth to someone we love. It's slow. It feels ridiculous sometimes. But it’s the only way to get across.

So the title became The Spoon and the Sea.

It felt right. It held the weight of the book without trying too hard. It reminded me of how the deepest connections are built: one story, one year, one spoonful at a time.

When my Grandma passed away, I could not stop talking about her.

I had managed to get to Australia in time to be by her side in her final ten days. After she passed, I felt embraced in a big hug of people who knew her, knew me, knew us. I flew back to Israel and found myself outside looking around at all the people who didn’t know her. Didn’t know that I was walking around broken-hearted.

I would walk into shops and buy something just so that I could force the salesperson to listen to a story about Grandma.

Memories kept popping into my mind all day and I was so scared to lose them.

“Why don’t you write?” Eitan kindly suggested. To help me (and spare him).

Ironically, in a way I started writing this book to try keep my Grandma alive. She was gone in the day to day but when I wrote, parts of her came back. The jackets, the brooch, the chocolates in a bowl by the door.

That shifted as the characters took on a life of their own. The character, Rose, came to certain junctions and was at odds with what my Grandma would have done. Time and time again, the character won over.

Writing helped me let her go.

Soon, The Spoon and the Sea will be out in the world. It’s a story about memory, identity, and bottling up some of that love in something timeless and shareable.

If it finds its way to you, I hope it stays with you.

Soon, The Spoon and the Sea will be out in the world, packaging some of that love in something timeless and shareable. I’ll be using this platform to publish in public, sharing behind the scenes of what works, what doesn’t quite land and everything I learn along the way.

If the book finds its way to you, I hope it stays with you.