Using Flashbacks in Your Memoir

What is a flashback? In memoir, a flashback is a scene from an unexpected memory that pops up and typically harkens back to a past event. A flashback usually occurs out of chronological order.  A person with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for example, will likely experience frequent flashbacks.  However, a flashback doesn’t have to be a negative recollection; it can also be positive, like a sudden outpouring of love for one’s late grandparents. 

I would also argue that you can also experience a flashforward, which would entail foresight, knowledge of the future, also known as foreshadowing in memoir writing. A best practice for writing flashbacks is to separate them from the rest of your text with three stars (***), centered on the lines above and below your flashback scene, indicating the unfolding flashback is out of sequence with the main text.

A word of caution: conventional wisdom dictates that flashbacks can be confusing to the reader.  Since the flashback is, by nature, a disruptive storytelling element, it is generally advised that flashbacks are best used judiciously.  A flashback is often employed to convey a haunting, untraceable memory that is out of sequence with the recollected chronology of events. Some things to consider with respect to flashbacks are the tone they convey, their placement in the body of your memoir, and their function in the larger context of your memoir.

Tone.  An isolated flashback can convey a specific resonant tone, or emotional undercurrent, running throughout your memoir, or it can serve as a dissonant moment, different in tone from the rest of your life story. For example, a memoir about the tragic loss of a teenaged girl’s life, might begin with a short-lived scene of innocent childhood nostalgia by flashing back to an idyllic summer afternoon by the neighborhood pond and featuring a queue of lightly bronzed children taking turns jumping from a tire swing into the placid waters.

Placement. Beginning a memoir with a flashback deliberately disorients the reader, immediately immersing the reader in the thick of the action without first grounding the reader in the present tense of the narrator’s life story. In the above example, the reader is unlikely to suspect the tragic turn of the memoir, based on its opening flashback.

Introducing a flashback in the middle of your memoir may affect the story’s pace, speeding up the slowest section significantly, especially if the flashback becomes a recurring element, like a slightly varied refrain that resides in the story’s center and functions as a subplot or as a means of filling in relevant backstory missing from the main plot of your memoir. 

Flashbacks employed at a memoir’s end can create closure by forming a loop connecting the memoir’s beginning, when the flashback was unfamiliar, with its conclusion, when the flashback now makes sense. This is an effective way to end, circling back to the beginning with a demonstrable personal change having been realized by the narrator who has undergone a transformation throughout the course of your memoir.

Shifting Point-of-View (POV). Finally, a flashback can also be used creatively as an opportunity to change the perspective from which the story is being told from the narrator’s viewpoint to a fresh POV.  However, this creative and experimental use of the flashback requires that the advanced writer be adept at developing uniquely distinctive voices so as to not obfuscate the memoir’s plot, confusing the reader unnecessarily. 

In the example I already mentioned in the fourth paragraph—the nostalgic flashback to childhood—the shift in tone could be used to create a shift in POV to a six year-old boy watching the tantalizing tire swing while distracted by the tinkling music of an approaching ice cream truck—all told from the boy’s inner thoughts. This flashback would be especially effective if the young boy ultimately grows up during the memoir to witness the death of the teenaged girl and to experience survivor’s guilt when his desperate attempts to save her from a burning car prove futile.

In the preceding example, keeping the flashbacks focused on safe, cool recollections from the past (childhood ice cream and quick dunks in the pond) in stark contrast to the main plot that revolves around red hot dangers of the car fire is another way to further distinguish between the memoir’s present and its flashbacks to the past.

When used strategically, well-executed flashbacks can be powerful storytelling elements.