Janie was pushing 40 when she found herself unexpectedly pregnant following a one-night stand with a married man. Four years later, however, she wouldn’t trade her life with Noah for anything. Her smart, affectionate son is the light of her life, even if it’s sometimes hard to juggle work, family and social life as a single mom.

But even though Janie adores Noah, something about his behavior, especially recently, troubles her. He often wakes up screaming from nightmares of drowning and is terrified of taking a bath or even washing his hands. Most upsetting to Janie is that, especially when Noah is frightened, he wails that he wants to go home and be with his mama, even when he’s in Janie’s arms in the Brooklyn apartment where he’s lived his whole life.

"[W]hether or not you believe in the phenomena that Guskin explores here, there’s much to consider in this provocative debut novel... THE FORGETTING TIME is a passionate entreaty to readers to embrace the present moment, to find joy, comfort and connection in the here and now."

When an incident at Noah’s preschool leads to the school director suspending him until Janie can get his behavior under control, Janie takes Noah to a number of child psychologists and psychiatrists, none of whom can give her satisfactory answers. One even suggests that Noah might be schizophrenic and prescribes anti-psychotic medication for him. Janie, on the verge of losing clients from her architecture and interior design business due to her struggles with Noah, is just about desperate enough to try anything, even admitting that he is very sick.

But then she comes across the work of Dr. Jerome Anderson, a psychiatrist whose unorthodox (to put it mildly) beliefs and approach have defined his life’s work even as they’ve derailed his one-time ambitions for more conventional professional recognition. Anderson is intrigued by Noah’s story, so much so that he offers to help Janie get to the bottom of Noah’s symptoms.

Anderson has some secrets of his own --- namely that he’s suffering from aphasia, a progressive form of dementia that is quickly cutting him off from his ability to remember words and language. As someone who has always valued clarity in thinking and writing, this is painful for Anderson. But he recognizes in Noah his last chance to write about an American case of the phenomenon he studies, a case study that will finally round out the other examples in his book manuscript and enable him to spread his research to a wider audience.

The ideas that Anderson (and, by extension, author Sharon Guskin, who includes lengthy case studies from a real-world expert on the topic) espouses are controversial, to say the least, and certainly will be fodder for more than one book group discussion, debate or outright argument. But whether or not you believe in the phenomena that Guskin explores here, there’s much to consider in this provocative debut novel --- from cultural differences in attitudes toward life and death to the question of whether or not parents can ever truly know their own children.

More than anything, THE FORGETTING TIME is a passionate entreaty to readers to embrace the present moment, to find joy, comfort and connection in the here and now.