Forget Me Not by Julie Soto

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When I was growing up, it was a truth universally acknowledged that Sacramento was a place to leave—at least in my experience. The theater was in New York. The beaches were in LA. The culture was two hours west in San Francisco. And what even was CSU Sacramento? I grew up surrounded by people who agreed that Sacramento is a great place to raise a family, but if you’re going to be an artist—get out. And I did. But like most Hallmark love stories where a city girl must return home from New York and learn to love her hometown roots with the help of a rough and rugged carpenter or mechanic or boatswain, I came home to Sacramento. And that boatswain, for me, was Forget Me Not.

Setting this book in Sacramento didn’t seem like a huge deal to me until I was a quarter into writing it. Suddenly, everything was very specific, and there was no way to get the book out of Sacramento. It was incredibly easy to know where Ama bought her donuts, where Elliot takes her for a date, which high school Ama went to, and what other people think of that. Some things were instinctual, like the precise location of Elliot’s flower shop—it’s the shop where I picked up prom corsages and boutonnieres, though now closed. About seventy-five percent of the locations mentioned in this book are real, and of that remaining quarter, about fifteen percent are locations that have either closed their doors or will be an inside joke with Sacramentans. Some names are cleverly veiled to protect my town, but if you know, you know.

I grew up driving past weddings in the McKinley Park Rose Garden, where a huge part of this book is set. I was never a little girl who dreamed of her wedding day, but when I sat down and tried to figure out what a perfect Sacramento wedding would look like, I found myself gravitating toward the Rose Garden and Midtown. Is it how I’d like to do my wedding one day? Maybe not. But I know I’d like to have Ama as my wedding planner.

It was important to me that Ama hadn’t left town for college o r a big career and then had to come back to Sacramento, as if iitt was a second choice. That’s something I always regret about my first several years back in my hometown—that I felt like I’d failed the quest to get out of Sacramento. For Ama in Forget Me Not, her dreams had always aligned with where she lived. She didn’t need to go live the city girl life before coming home to fall in love. She knew she could accomplish everything she wanted from two blocks east of where she grew up. And sure, I threw in a rough and rugged boatswain who owns a flower shop, but can you blame me?