The Mango Tree: A Fort Myers Memoir That Opens with a Felony
A Fort Myers woman fires a gun at a man stealing fruit from her yard. The charge: felony. The fruit: a mango. The shooter: the author’s mom.
That’s how Annabelle Tometich’s memoir The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony opens, and it only gets more Florida from there. Tometich grew up in Fort Myers as the daughter of a Filipino immigrant mother and a white father, navigating the in-betweenness of being too Filipina for her neighborhood and too American for her mother’s family back home. She went from medical school rejection to line cook to eighteen years as a food critic for The News-Press, writing her way through grief, identity, and a family that expresses love through cooking.
The Washington Post named it one of the Best Books of 2024, and Eater picked it as a best food book of the spring. It’s warm, funny, and rooted in the messy, mango-scented reality of Southwest Florida life.
