Meet-the-Author Recording with Sharon Cameron

The Forgetting |

Sharon Cameron introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating The Forgetting.

Volume 90%
Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard Shortcuts
Play/PauseSPACE
Increase Volume
Decrease Volume
Seek Forward
Seek Backward
Captions On/Offc
Fullscreen/Exit Fullscreenf
Mute/Unmutem
Seek %0-9
00:00
00:00
00:00
 

Translate this transcript in the header View this transcript Dark mode on/off

Sharon Cameron: Hi, this is Sharon Cameron, and I am the author of The Forgetting. So I wasn't the kind of kid who always dreamed of being a writer. I never wrote moody poems or kept a diary or a journal. In fact, I never wrote one unassigned word until I was in my 30s. I was a musician, a classical pianist, which I loved, and I still do love. But even though I wasn't a writer or wasn't a writer yet, I should say, I have always been a reader, an avid, obsessive reader. I think I've read the Lord of the Rings forty-six or forty-seven times now.

Ever since I could read my first words, story has shaped me.
And so has history. I am fascinated by history because history is the sum total of every real thing that has ever happened to every real human being since the beginning of time. History is the ultimate story. And so much of it is lost because we have forgotten it. Loves, lives, deaths, wars, cultures, and languages that were just as familiar to the people that lived them as our lives are today. All of them lost, erased from time, because our memories did not hold them. Because we would not, or could not, write them down.

History, forgotten and forever lost is such a mystery to uncover.
And it made me wonder who were these incredible lives that we've forgotten because they died within other people's memories? What would happen if we didn't forget and just retained everything? Could our brains even cope? Or, what would happen if every so often we lost everything, all our own history? What if the kind of memory that contains our name, our friends and family, parents and children was just gone? What if we forgot every experience that has helped to make us who we are? Would we even be the same person anymore? Are we born to be a certain person? Or is it the memories of our experience that shape us?

And that is why I decided to write The Forgetting about a group of people in a walled city who know that every twelve years they will forget their own personal
history, unless it is written down in a book. In the walled city, your book is your truth and your identity and stays tied to your wrist at all times. So that after The Forgetting, when you wake up, you will still know who you are. But it's so easy, isn't it, when you're writing to change, the truth.

I'm going to read the first page of The Forgetting, which is an excerpt from a book of memories kept in the archives of the walled city, describing
what it's like to wake up after The Forgetting.

From the first book of The Forgetting, page forty-one.

I have forgotten.

When I first opened my eyes I saw a room of white stone, and the light was bright, too bright, coming into the room from two high windows. I have never been so afraid. I don't know this room. I don't know this girl who woke with me or these children who cry, their faces streaked with black lines. They've forgotten, too. But this book was tied to my wrist, and the book says I have a family, and that my family will be marked with dye so I'll know them. I think I have to believe the book.

There is violence outside. We've barred the door.
I don't know what else is outside this room, but I think there are more of us, and that they did not wake up with a book. I want to scream like they are. I want to cry like the children. I want to claw my own skin and find out what's buried inside. I want to know who I've been.

The book says I knew this Forgetting would come. That it's happened before and will happen again. We have to write it all down. Everything about us, as the book has told me to do now. The children with the marks on their cheeks run from me. I think I am their mother. I will read them this book. I'll tell them their names and I will tell myself mine.

We are made of our memories. Now we are nothing. It feels like death.

What have we done to deserve this piece of hell?

This Meet-the-Author Recording with Sharon Cameron was exclusively created in September 2021 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Scholastic.