Interview Conducted by Ace Siatkowski

Q: You’ve spent years as a journalist and food writer. What moment made you realize that this story, your family’s story, needed to become a memoir instead of an article or essay?

A: In 2019, I was offered what I thought was my big break: a position at the Tampa Bay Times, Florida’s largest daily newspaper. After fourteen years in journalism, it felt like the moment I’d been working toward. But when the offer came through, the salary was barely higher than what I was already making. I realized I couldn’t justify uprooting my family for what was essentially the same paycheck. That moment forced me to pause. I started asking myself, If not this, then what’s next

What followed was a kind of midlife reckoning. I thought maybe I could pivot, write a book that combined food essays and recipes, something light and personal. I sent it out to a few agents, but the only response I received said, “You have an interesting voice, but I don’t understand what this is.” Honestly, I didn’t either. Then a close friend, someone who’d written a memoir, told me, “Your strongest work is when you’re being completely honest about your childhood and the trauma that shaped you. Drop the recipes. Tell the story.”

At first, I resisted and said, “I’m not writing a memoir.” But once I started connecting those fragments: stories about my parents, my siblings, the years after my dad died, it began to take shape. I realized there was something much larger here, something that could speak to others as well as give my family a record of who we were.

Most of it came together in 2020, during the months I was furloughed from the newsroom. I poured everything into it, around 160,000 words in three months, and then spent the next few years carving it down to the story that truly mattered. It took me a long time to admit it, but once I did, I understood: this wasn’t just a collection of essays. It was a memoir, and it was the only story I could tell.

Q: Your mother, Josefina, is at the heart of this book, fierce, complicated, and deeply human. How did writing The Mango Tree change the way you see her, and your relationship with her?

A: Completely. When I first started writing, I had a very two-dimensional view of her. I used to sum her up too quickly, “She was wild, she was difficult, end of story.” It was a way of protecting myself, of not having to sit with the harder parts. But the deeper I wrote, the more I began to see her fully.

Writing gave me permission to recognize that so much of what she did had reasons, some of them flawed, some even destructive, but reasons all the same. She lived an extraordinary, messy, vivid life. Once I began breaking it down on the page, I realized she wasn’t just the chaos I remembered, she was complicated, layered, human.

Q: That reflection really comes through. I think a lot of readers, especially those who’ve had complicated relationships with parents, will feel that. It’s something I’ve seen in my own writing, too. When you step back and put the story on paper, you start to understand even if you don’t forgive.

A: Exactly. Even if I never fully come to terms with everything, I can see where she was coming from. I may never make those same choices, but I understand her motivations now in a way I couldn’t before.

Q: There’s such tenderness in that. So many family stories tend to simplify the mother figure into something symbolic, either the saint or the storm. But your book refuses that.

A: That was important to me. The “headline version” of my mother painted her in a single, unforgiving light, and I wanted this book to offer something closer to truth. Not a pretty, tied-up version, but something honest and nuanced. She had a stroke last year, and before that, she was diagnosed with vascular dementia. Early on, she actually helped me remember timelines, she’d correct me sometimes, even tease me. She’d say, “Oh, this is your cooking book,” and in a way, she was right. It’s not about food, but about family, about what we’re made of.

Q: Like a kind of cookbook of memory.

A: Exactly. I don’t think she’ll ever be able to read it, but I see her differently now. The book let me hold both truths at once, love and frustration, admiration and hurt. Family isn’t one flavor. It’s the whole meal, chaos and all.

Q: Florida often feels like its own character in your story, both beautiful and chaotic. How do you see the landscape of Florida reflecting your family’s journey and identity?

A: Oh, completely. Especially Fort Myers. When you read about Florida, it’s usually Miami, maybe the Keys, never the smaller towns. I realized I’d never read anything set in my hometown, especially from a writer of color. So when I started The Mango Tree, I felt a responsibility to show Fort Myers as it really is: the good, the bad, the awkward, the weird. It’s kind of like my mom in that way, beautiful, chaotic, contradictory, and deeply alive.

Growing up, I was half Filipino in a mostly white community, surrounded by Latino families. Everyone would try to guess, “Puerto Rican? Dominican? Cuban?” and I’d have to explain, “No, Filipino.” There was always this sense of not quite fitting in anywhere. There’s a chapter that begins, “Nobody’s from Fort Myers,” which was something people said constantly. And it’s true in a way, other than the Seminoles, no one really is from there, but that phrase shaped me. It made me feel like a kind of nobody in a place that didn’t quite claim me, yet was still undeniably mine.

Q: That’s so striking. I actually have family from Dunedin and Clearwater, and a close friend from Fort Myers, so I get it, those small towns are often overlooked when people talk about Florida. We usually only hear about Miami, or the wild news headlines. But the smaller, quieter places carry their own kind of truth.

A: Exactly. Those are the stories I wanted to write. Florida isn’t just the “Florida Man” stereotype, it’s small towns, family kitchens, storm-battered porches, and people who stay behind when the tourists leave. I wanted to give that version of Florida a face, a voice. For me, the landscape became a mirror: its beauty and chaos reflected everything about my family, our resilience, our contradictions, our roots in a place most people forget exists.

Q: As someone of Filipino and white heritage growing up in the South, how did that dual identity shape your voice and the way you tell stories?

A: I think it feeds directly into that feeling of being a “nobody,” of never really belonging anywhere. I was always trying to figure out how to fit into a room, how to read the space around me. Half Filipino, half white, in a mostly white southern town, you’re always negotiating which part of yourself people will see first.

It reminded me a bit of something the writer Lauren Oyler said recently. Someone asked her how she captures social nuances so precisely, and she said it came from constantly having to read the room, growing up one way, then moving to New York and learning to navigate another world entirely. That really resonated. I think I’ve carried that same sense of alertness into my writing.

There’s this story I tell in the book about the first time I went to Hawaii. I was with my boyfriend at the time, and we walked into a surf shop, and he said, “I kept mistaking other people for you before I found you.” And I looked around, everyone looked like me. For the first time, I wasn’t the one who stood out. It was the most freeing feeling I’d ever had. I even applied to the University of Hawaii’s medical school afterward, thinking, If I could live like this, just breathe easy every day, how wonderful would that be? I didn’t get in, but there’s some alternate universe where I’m a doctor in Honolulu, surfing every morning before work.

Q: (laughing) Honestly, not a bad alternate timeline. I can definitely relate to that feeling, being Puerto Rican, I’ve seen that same disconnect. In the States, people expect you to look or act a certain way, but when you go home, you see every shade, every kind of person, and you realize how complex identity really is. There’s something grounding about being surrounded by people who simply get it without you having to explain.

A: Exactly. It’s like your body exhales for the first time. That moment of belonging, however brief, changes something in you. And it definitely shaped how I tell stories. My voice comes from the in-between, from always trying to understand the layers that make people who they are.

Q: You mentioned memory just now, and that connects to something I noticed in the book. The Mango Tree moves through time in a nonlinear way, almost like the way memory itself works. What made that structure feel right for this story, and how did you balance truth with memory?

A: Yeah, the structure came pretty naturally. The book starts in the courtroom, in 2015, then drifts backward into childhood and moves forward from there. Even back when I thought it was going to be a cookbook, I knew I wanted to start in that courtroom. That was the moment everything changed, when I was forced to take ownership of my family’s story, of my mother, of all the things I’d spent years trying to bury.

A reporter once asked me, “Did your mom really shoot a man over a mango?” And I realized if I was going to answer that question honestly, I had to go way back, to my parents, to my grandmother, to the tiny decisions that ripple into something bigger. My grandmother, for example, was this righteous Southern woman who fed me candy for breakfast, loving, but also quietly racist in ways I couldn’t recognize at the time. She was both things at once. And I think that’s where the nonlinear structure came from, trying to hold those contradictions.

Q: That’s such a vivid way to put it, the butterfly effect of family, memory, and consequence.

A: Exactly. That’s what the book became, a long chain of small moments leading to one big explosion. The structure had to mirror that. Because memory doesn’t move in straight lines, it loops, collides, circles back, just like family history does.

Q: And again, on the topic of mangos, food is everywhere in this book. It’s been joked about as a “cookbook that turned into a memoir,” but it’s more than that. You write not just about fruit, but about the language of taste, texture, and inheritance. What does food allow you to express that ordinary narrative cannot?

 A: I’ve always written through food. Before I was a writer, I was a cook, I worked in restaurants for years, and before that, I learned to cook because I had to. Food has always been a rhythm in my life, a way of marking time. So, when I started writing The Mango Tree, food naturally found its way in. I didn’t plan it; it’s just how I understand the world.

Food is also such an effective entry point into culture. You don’t have to have been to the Philippines, or Hawaii, or even Fort Myers, to feel what those places are like through the way I describe a meal or a kitchen. Taste and smell carry memory in a way words alone can’t. They’re a kind of shorthand for emotion.

When I started the project, I wasn’t trying to make it a “food memoir.” But once I began working with my agent and editor, they both said, “Lean into it.” And I thought, really? You want more food? And they said, “Yes. Always more food.” Once I gave myself permission, it clicked. Food became a way of weaving everything together, the past and present, love and loss, joy and hunger.

And honestly, I didn’t think I had the authority to write a true “food memoir.” I wasn’t a celebrity chef or a big name critic. But I realized that food didn’t have to be the answer, it could be the connective tissue. The story doesn’t end neatly; my family is still complicated, my mother is still my mother, and I’m still me. Hopefully a better version, maybe a little more honest. Food helped me show that life doesn’t resolve like a recipe, it simmers, it burns, it starts again.

Q: I love that. I think in a lot of minority cultures, food is the language, it’s how we say what we can’t say out loud. I know in the Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, people will argue endlessly about who made what first, mofongo wars, basically. But behind that is pride and memory.

A: Exactly. Food carries lineage. In Florida, you feel it too, there’s such a mix of influences: Caribbean, Latin, Southern, Filipino. You taste history in the dishes. It’s chaotic, messy, beautiful. That’s why it had to be part of the book. It’s not just what we eat, it’s how we remember, how we love, and sometimes, how we survive.

Q: Interesting question here: if your mother were sitting with us today, what do you think she’d say about how you told this story? And what do you hope readers take away from it?

A: (laughs) My siblings and I actually talked about that early on, after the book sold. We’d ask each other, “Do you think Mom will ever read this?” And my sister would say, “Have you ever seen Mom pick up a book?” Which, fair point. Unless it was a nursing textbook, she just didn’t read for fun.

She had a photographic memory, though, and part of me wonders if reading would’ve been overwhelming for her, like she’d have to remember every word forever. And as her health declined, it became clear she’d never get to read it. But if she could, I think she’d say, “Yeah, I did all those things. What did you expect? I was a single mother, 9,000 miles from home, raising three kids with no family around.” She wasn’t someone who carried shame. She was bold, unrepentant, and sometimes infuriating, but in a way, I admire that.

There’s a story I tell about her probation officer, he offered to end her probation early if she’d just apologise for what she did. And she looked him dead in the eye and said, “No. I’m not sorry. That man should be sorry. I’m not.” She served every single day of that five-year probation because she refused to fake remorse. That’s my mother to a T, stubborn, fearless, and completely herself.

Q: (laughs) That sounds familiar. My mom has that same kind of steel memory, she’ll correct me on the smallest childhood details. I’ll say, “That’s how I remember it!” and she’ll go, “Well, it didn’t happen that way.” I think that’s the beauty of memoir, it’s your truth, even if it’s not everyone’s version of it.

A: Exactly. When I started, I was still thinking like a journalist, I wanted every detail fact-checked, every family member interviewed. But a friend told me, “Just start writing. You can verify later.” And she was right. If I’d focused only on accuracy, I’d have lost the emotional truth. The memoir needed to reflect how it felt, not just what happened.

That’s something I tell other nonfiction writers now, don’t get so caught up in the details that you erase the heart. If you’re too focused on the color of the car, you’ll miss what sitting in that car felt like. That’s the part readers connect to.

Q: That’s really well put. I think a lot of nonfiction writers get caught in that trap, fearing they’ll get something “wrong” and losing the emotion in the process.

A: Yeah, exactly. That’s what makes nonfiction both terrifying and rewarding, you have to show yourself. It’s like Lauren Oyler said recently: if you’re a gymnast, the leotard is part of the uniform. You can’t hide your body; it’s how the judges see your form. Memoir is the same way, you have to show yourself, vulnerabilities and all. It’s part of the craft.

Once you accept that, it gets easier. You realize the story doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be true. Readers don’t come for flawless recollection; they come for honesty. That’s what makes a memoir resonate, the humanity of it.

Q: That’s such a beautiful way to put it. Sometimes the rough drafts are the most human versions of ourselves. It’s raw, it’s real, it hasn’t been overworked yet.

A: Exactly. That’s what I try to remember, too. You can tighten and refine, but you can’t edit out the pulse. At the end of the day, what matters most isn’t precision, it’s presence.