Annabelle Tometich’s delightful sense of humor sweetens even the toughest, most humiliating moments of her life in her outstanding memoir, The Mango Tree (Little, Brown and Company, 2024). Beginning with an epigraph from her mother’s Facebook feed, the book announces its tone immediately: laugh-out-loud funny. “I shook my family tree and a bunch of nuts fell out.” (What family can’t relate to that?) The storytelling and the writing in The Mango Tree are as good as it gets.
The first chapter opens with Tometich’s mother wearing orange and handcuffs. Annabelle and her sister, Amber, watch the court proceedings on a big-screen TV, commenting that their mother can’t even hear what’s going on because she doesn’t have her hearing aids in. The charge: “firing a missile into an occupied dwelling, vehicle, building, or aircraft.” Or, as the family has come to know it, “The 2015 Mango Missile Crisis.” Tometich’s pairing of an event that is both frightening and serious with wry humor makes the memoir irresistible. As the story unfolds, readers come to understand why her mother is so fiercely protective of her mango tree. She has nurtured it for years, and it is a living reminder of the island she left behind.
Beneath the humor lie serious explorations of mental illness, identity conflicts faced by mixed-race and immigrant children, and America’s treatment of immigrants as second-class citizens. Annabelle’s mother, a hard-working Filipina nurse who is a Nobody, is married to her White father, who is a Somebody. Her mother pinches her daughters’ noses every night, hoping to make them narrower—unwittingly teaching Annabelle that White features are desirable and island features are not. Society reinforces this lesson again and again:
“Mom . . . was taught repeatedly that she was nothing in the US. By her mother-in-law. By the patients who demanded white nurses and refused her care. By the doctors who ignored her perfect score on the board exam, who ignored her in general until a bedpan was full.”
Annabelle watches her father sit idle while her mother does everything: cooking, mowing the lawn in cowboy boots and a muumuu, growing food, and caring for three children. He plays video games. She works relentlessly to give her children “the American dream.” The father briefly seems to engage with family life when their third child—a son—is born, underscoring the painful message that boys matter more than girls. Soon after, he dies of asphyxiation, found with a plastic bag coated in Wite-Out over his face. Suicide? Drug overdose? The question lingers.
Annabelle Tometich
Following his death—and those of other family members—Annabelle’s mother’s mental health deteriorates further. Yet despite everything, she continues to care for her children as best she can. Late in the book, Annabelle admits that her fear of becoming her mother blinded her to her mother’s strengths. She grew much of the family’s food. She worked as a nurse until her knees were destroyed. She was frugal to a fault, even hoarding trash. But she got results. All three children went on to higher education. Far from her homeland, “She staked a place for herself and her family in a country that refused to make that easy.”
Several trips to the Philippines provide rich cultural contrast with Annabelle’s life in America. There, her brown skin does not mark her as a nobody.
Many aspects of this memoir are admirable, but perhaps none more so than Tometich’s refusal to wallow in self-pity. The lessons she draws from her life are ones we all need to absorb, such as there is no such thing as a normal family:
“That abnormal is the norm, and it’s something to be treasured. Our abnormalities don’t have to define us, but they do shape us. They rough up our edges and give us texture.”
As an adult living in Fort Myers, Annabelle finds happiness with her “normal” husband and success as a food critic writing under a Frenchman’s pseudonym. “This is the dream I never thought to dream,” she writes, “a life so patently unimaginable, as a fatherless, mixed-race kid growing up with a manic-depressive Filipina mother in Robert E. Lee County, that the mere possibility of it makes my head tingle.”
Any reader with a heart will be cheering for Annabelle Tometich’s continued success and happiness.
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