In Between Florida and Family
The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony by Annabelle Tometich (Little, Brown & Company 2024)
Reviewed by Sam Wilber
Floridians know it is impossible to capture their homeland’s nuance. Authors like Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey have leaned into Florida’s lawless reputation through crime novels. A Land Remembered (1984) has publicized Florida as a wilderness of people from across the nation. Floridian literature demonstrates the state’s amalgamation of cultures and mythical histories, usually ones associated with wacky crimes and mystifying behavior. In her latest memoir, The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony (2024), Annabelle Tometich illustrates the ever confusing, evolving nature of Floridian familial legacies that never seem to adhere to one cohesive narrative.
As if emerging from a Florida myth herself, Tometich’s opening scene features her mother in a mango-orange jumpsuit. Her mother is in jail for shooting at a man who she accused of stealing her mangos and trespassing on her property. Although she only fired a BB gun, Tometich’s mother faces a lengthy jail sentence for her actions. Her mother’s arrest leads to a reflection on Tometich’s childhood, starting with her earliest memories as a toddler in Fort Myers until confronting her present circumstances: her mother’s felony status.
Tometich’s family saga feels nothing short of fictional; the family tales are quintessentially Floridian. They have their own “Florida man” stories (or in this case, “Florida woman shoots man for stealing mangos”). Primarily focused on her tumultuous upbringing in the 80s, Tometich admits her family’s “wacky” history, starting with her parents’ troubled and abusive marriage. Her father is absorbed in anything but his family. His days are spent playing video games, avoiding his children, and occasionally completing tasks assigned by his wife. Tometich eventually reveals her father’s accidental death in a motel parking lot. He is discovered with a plastic bag lined with white out around his head when Tometich is only nine years old. Some of her family members maintain her father’s death was accidental, while Tometich herself believes his death was suicide after a nasty fight between her parents.
Tometich’s childhood continues almost too sad to be true. After her father’s death, her uncle comes to stay with her family, following what Tometich refers to as the “family medical pipeline” her mother has set up for the family. Her uncle is only one of many family members to immigrate from the Philippines and start working at a hospital in the United States. Overcome with grief after leaving wife and baby daughter, Tometich’s uncle hangs himself in their garage. Weeks later, Tometich’s grandmother on her father’s side dies, resulting in another funeral within a few short months. The myth of Tometich’s childhood grows: her father’s death by white out inhalation, her uncle’s suicide in the garage, and her mother’s jail time for shooting a man allegedly stealing her mangos. Although Tometich wrestles with embarrassment over her family history, she refrains from telling readers how to feel or think about her family. This is the Tometich family, ugly truths and all. Instead of telling readers to judge her family, or even warning readers to think twice before throwing the first stone.
The Mango Tree invites reflection upon the family unit, specifically as it relates to the “in-betweenness” felt by immigrant families. Mama Tometich is originally from the Philippines. Annabelle Tometich is half-white, half-Filipina. Through the eyes of their white neighbors, this identity places the Tometich family as outsiders in Fort Myers. Although Tometich was born and raised in Fort Myers, her memoir wrestles with what almost every Floridian knows– a double homeland. From snowbirds to immigrants, Florida is filled with families who are rarely born and raised in the state. Much like Florida itself, Tometich describes herself as not quite here nor there. In Fort Myers, she is too Filipina for her primarily white neighborhood, but she is too American to comfortably acclimate to her mother’s family in the Philippines. For Tometich, this in-betweenness represents both heartache and family identity. During her childhood, she struggles to reconcile the Filipina part of herself by copying the trends of her white peers. The Philippines part of her heritage positions her as a foreigner in a white county; her mother is ultimately condemned as an outsider despite her thirty years in the US. By the end of the memoir, Tometich asks readers to believe that two things can be true at once. Her in-betweenness is both a proudly worn identity and a cause of childhood conflict, a commonality between Tometich and her siblings.
Tometich’s ruminations on a Floridian childhood are reminiscent of The Florida Project (2017) directed by Sean Baker. The movie follows another mother-daughter relationship living in a motel in Kissimmee, Florida. The juxtaposition of Disney World against their makeshift home in a motel parallels the contrasts of Tometich’s upbringing. Both memoir and film depict Florida as a place of opposites and inconsistencies, specifically for low-income families. The Mango Tree and The Florida Project also blur the lines between adult realities and childhood innocence. The children seem to just barely be safe. Florida is constructed in the memoir and film as a place of in-between where families must develop survival mechanisms.
This “in-betweenness” is what makes The Mango Tree so accessible. Family and belonging are not unique themes for any memoir, yet Tometich’s refreshing iteration of her family saga exemplifies the “both/and” truth of families. Family history is complicated, loveable, messy, hopeful, and discouraging. The Mango Tree probes us to think about our own family dynamics: How do we reconcile with wayward family members? How do we process divorce, death, and homesickness? How can we make sense of family identity? Tometich wades through her own Floridian history via memoir by dissecting the complicated nature of belonging to both place and family.
Sam Wilber double majored in English and Biblical Studies at Palm Beach Atlantic University, and recently graduated with a Masters in English from James Madison University. You can find more book reviews on her Instagram, @whatsonsamsshelf.
