How is the 1990 movie Flatliners like writing a memoir?

I was an impressionable seventeen-year-old who loved scary movies when Flatliners came out in 1990. The movie is about five medical students, played by popular actors Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt, and Kevin Bacon, who want to find out what happens after death. They take turns medically stopping their hearts (flatlining) and waiting increasingly longer periods of time to be revived to experience more of their after-death visions. But of course, there are consequences. They each visit experiences from their past that are unresolved, and each has to keep revisiting their memories until there is a resolution. I won’t spoil anything about the movie (take yourself back to 1990 by watching it!), but his movie is an apt simile for how we as writers have to keep revising tender parts of our pasts in order to write about them so that we can make sense of them.

Accessing memory

Julia Roberts’ character Rachel’s story is the one I remember the most clearly from the movie. (Content warning and spoilers in this paragraph.) While flatlining, she keeps revisiting a memory of her father dying by suicide when she was young. In each subsequent visit to the memory, she learns more and more about why he died (PTSD after returning from the Vietnam War, addicted to morphine) and ultimately her feelings of guilt and sadness are lifted. A resolution, if not a happy ending to the movie.

When we write memoir in particular, or when we use past experiences to illustrate points in our narrative nonfiction, we have to revisit our memories. Some of our memories are painful, and it is difficult and traumatic to fully recall how we felt and what we experienced in those moments. Our brains protect us by packing memories away, and we have to keep poking and prodding and unwrapping layers of protection to get back to what we’ve tried so hard to put behind us. It’s hard, it’s scary, and it can have consequences. 

Taking care

In the movie, the after-death experiences bleed into the living experiences of the characters. In our writing lives, accessing painful memories also can impact our quotidian routines. Ways to minimize impact can include journaling, therapy, or creating boundaries around how much time and energy is spent reliving upsetting experiences. Working on my micro memoir, I broke the hardest memories to revisit into tiny pieces, so I could write about them separately and figure out how they fit together later. Perhaps you will write about your most painful parts all at once over a weekend in a hotel room with no internet or television. Maybe you will work virtually next to another writer to be accountable for getting it done. Maybe you will give yourself a set number of 25-minute writing sprints to get it out of the way. Perhaps you will take a walk, take a bath, go out to dinner, and/or meditate to create some distance between what you are writing and the rest of your life. 

Finding resolution

Revisiting painful memories is hard. There’s no escaping that. Flatliners reminded me that we can (carefully) revisit memories until we make sense of them and feel a resolution, even if the resolution is just putting it into words. I feel I have resolved some of my past issues because I used the lenses of age and distance to get a new understanding. And I did that through writing and writing and writing and revising and revising and revising - no medically-induced death necessary.

Are you working on a project that draws on your memories and experiences? How are you accessing and resolving your past?

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