Florida-based writer Annabelle Tometich, who works as a journalist, was thrust into her family’s own version of a “Florida Man” story in 2015 when her mother admitted to firing shots into the truck of a man trying to steal the mangoes from one of her prized backyard fruit trees. “That incident was something I didn’t want to address for a solid two or three years after the fact,” she said. But as Tometich, the journalist trained in objectivity, began to reckon with both her present reality and the past events that led to her mother’s crime, a story of immigration, trauma, and making peace with our coping mechanisms and those of the people we love began to take shape. Tometich talks about the resulting memoir, The Mango Tree, in the conversation below.
Annabelle Tometich went from medical-school flunky to line cook to journalist to author. She spent eighteen years as a food writer, editor, and restaurant critic forThe News-Pressin her hometown of Fort Myers, Florida. Her writing has appeared in theWashington Post, USA Today, Catapult,theTampa Bay Times,and many more publications. Tometich has won more than a dozen awards for her stories, including first place for Features Writing from the Florida Society of News Editors in 2020. She (still) lives in Fort Myers with her husband, two children, and her ever-fiery Filipina mother.
Why do you make the choice to get the reader used to the idea that you and your family are different on the very first page with the lines, “They are not like us. We are not like them?”
I don’t think you think your childhood is weird until you get older and put it all together and say, ‘This collection of experiences is incredibly different.’ I had a very ‘90s childhood, despite the Filippino-ness of it all. Part of my journey through the book was that I still saw my family as this group of outsiders, especially my mother, who refused to bend to the American system in a lot of ways, but not in others. Every family has their idiosyncrasies that come to define them in different ways. Ours might be, every now and then, a little more explosive than other people’s, but a huge part of my identity was realizing that our issues aren’t that different from everybody else’s. But for a long time, I thought, ‘My family is crazy, and I don’t want anybody to know about it.’ But for better or worse, those things shape who you are. Accepting that is still a process for me, but it’s still important. There are parts of [my mother] that are phenomenal, and that I could certainly learn from.
How much of the story is about the desire for control?
I think that’s just how my mother lives her life. I don’t even think that today, she would acknowledge that she was a control freak. There was so little she could control outside of her household. Her job was out of her control; she had to do what her bosses said, and they treated her like garbage because she was a Filipino nurse and not a white nurse. She took really strong control where she could. The same for my grandmother. The fact was that they were both named Jo and were so similar in so many ways, but were such polar opposites in other ways. I don’t think my grandmother ever forgave my mother for marrying my father. That stripped her of so much control, because now, she can’t have this blonde-haired, blue-eyed lineage. She couldn’t have the WASP-y lineage that was always, I think, her vision of how life would progress in the United States. She lashed out and took it out on my mother, and by extension, our entire family.
As a kid, you really don’t have a lot of options. I think I got lucky in so many ways, because I could have fallen into worse obsessions, but for me, it was numbers. I was trying to make things add up. I think it would be a very different book if I had chosen to take control by different means. When you’re only taught one way of parenting, as the eldest daughter, I mirrored my mother’s style of parenting when it came my turn at 12 years old to try and raise my other siblings. I came to that reckoning in college, when my now-husband said, ‘I think I might have f*cked up my sister.’ I said, ‘I might have, too.’ Then you get even older, and you realize you didn’t have a lot of choices. Trying to have empathy for that younger version of myself was a big goal of mine.
When you detail your mother’s crime in the beginning of the book, you write, “Anyone can get into a shootout. This is America. But a mango shootout? Get ready to go viral.” Why did you make the choice to try to identify with news consumers, when you didn’t have to do so as a writer?
The journalist in me is very much alive and well. In my head, I could see it. You want ‘mango’ in the lede, because that’s going to drive SEO. You want ‘shooting’ in there somewhere. You want ‘Florida’ in there somewhere. Even just writing the book, I’d think, ‘If I were writing that headline, as someone who works in digital journalism day in and day out, these are the SEO words that I want at the top, because I know it’s going to boost it in the search algorithms. I had even more detail in there. Maybe that is part of empathy. I get why the headline writers chose the words that they chose. I would have done the same thing if this were the story that came across my desk that day. My first drafts were all written in AP Style. I had a disclaimer at the front. ‘This book is written in AP Style, because if my editors have taught me anything, it’s that it’s OK.’ It made it all the way to copy edits.
How does the metaphor of The Wizard of Oz work for so many of the characters in the story-you, your mom, your dad?
It took me forever to understand my grandmother was racist. That was another a-ha moment. She called us monkeys and said, ‘Thank God you didn’t get slanty eyes in addition to those giant noses,’ but I thought she loved us. She gave us all this candy! But that’s racism. I think she did love us. That’s the wildest part of it. For a while, she was like my best friend. I was at her house multiple nights a week and on the weekends, especially when my sister was really young. I never thought anything she did was harmful when I was a kid. It all just seemed like fun. Going to Gramma’s was always fun, because there was ice cream, and The Wizard of Oz, and we could stay up late. Then, you start to realize some of the little jokes that she was making aren’t that funny, and they’re actually kind of hurtful and damaging.
I’m sure, subconsciously, those little bites and digs landed somewhere in my psyche. But everyone has soft spots and weaknesses. In my head, her house was Oz. It was being transported away from this place where it was all rules and structure, and vegetables had to be eaten and trees had to be trimmed. And physically, my grandmother shrunk over time. By the time she was living with us later, she was the Wicked Witch of the West. I understood at that point that she wasn’t this magical candy person that I thought she was. There was an edge to her that I’d never experienced. And navigating my childhood was very Dorothy-like. Where is home if a parent dies, or your mother is from a different country? What does ‘home’ mean, and how do you get there? It did become another kind of convenient metaphor.
Of your father’s mother, you write, “Gramma looks weak and powerless. But Gramma is white.” Why make the choice to isolate that last line on the page?
Even just going out with her, if we’d go to a diner and it were me and Gramma, we had great service and everyone took good care of us. If it were me and my mom, we were going to wait a little extra and get the little table by the door. We’re not going to get a booth. As a kid, you absorb those things subconsciously. You don’t truly understand what’s happening, but at some point you realize, ‘Oh, that’s because Gramma’s white.’ She had generational wealth. She had family wealth from her husband. So she had the ability to make decisions for herself and take control of situations via her money that my mom didn’t have at the time. That was all part and parcel of her whiteness.
When your parents buy their dream house, you write about how the white, woman real estate agent reacted to your mother controlling the finances in the family: “She locks eyes with her, raises an eyebrow, and nods, as if realizing she’s been barking up the wrong tree all this time.” How often did those microaggressions happen during your childhood, and how do they still manifest themselves?
People assumed my mother didn’t speak English. They would talk to me, thinking I was the translator for the family, which is a very common situation in a lot of immigrant households. It was a stereotype that was being pushed on my mom a lot of the time. My father loved food. He would follow all the restaurant reviews back in the day. We went down to a restaurant in Naples, which is much richer than Fort Myers. They wouldn’t serve us because my mother was wearing blue jeans. Other women in different kinds of blue jeans walked in. My dad, to his credit, pitched a fit. We got Arby’s on the way home. There was another time when my dad was pushing my sister and me in the grocery cart. A woman came up and asked him if we were adopted. When my mother came back and she realized that they were together, this look of disgust came over her face. But my mother is the first one to say, ‘I speak English perfectly,’ and the first to correct people.
What aspects of the immigrant experience put your mom in fight-or-flight mode?
I think whenever she brushed up against any kind of law enforcement figure. I think anyone who was dismissive of her, her hackles went up and she was like, ‘You need to take me seriously.’ That was a big realization since the shooting and her court appearances. I think I shut down for a few years after that and didn’t ever want to talk about it. But the more I started unpacking it, it was like, ‘She is this way for a reason.’ All of these coping mechanisms that she developed were developed for reasons. They’re not all the best ones, by any means, but they’re there for reasons. Understanding that helped me understand her a lot better.
Have you found the answer to the question you ask yourself on page 258: “How do you stop cycles from repeating?”
For forever, I thought, ‘Just don’t become your mother, whatever you do.’ That understanding that just because I do some of the things that she did, or I embrace some of the things she did doesn’t mean I’m becoming her. It means I’m seeing the value in this little tidbit of her personality or mentality that is worthy of continuing on. Hopefully, I have a balanced enough life that I can pick and choose. Hopefully, I’ve come to a place where I’m able to separate the good from the bad. Self-awareness is key. There’s value in a lot of the stuff my mother did.
On page 289, you write of your mother that “the justice system does not see her as a whole person worthy of leniency and redemption. And up until this point, neither did I.” Was that the point of writing the book?
Yes. In reality, [the justice system] was doing the same thing that I was. I didn’t want to see her as a whole person, and neither does the legal system. To accept that means I have to do better than they did.
With this memoir, Tometich is already doing that work, both personally and professionally. “A big part of accepting and understanding who I am is realizing that we are not that different just because we’re Filipino in Robert E. Lee County, Fla. Everybody has their issues,” she said. This book begins as the exploration of a specific crime but expands into a lovely story about reconciling one’s past.
NONFICTION
The Mango Tree
By Annabelle Tometich
Little Brown and Company
Published April 2, 2024
