To put it in stark terms, Flashback is the novel in which I share the psychological and real-world reality (if not any details of the actual experience) of the day I came home from college early in my freshman year to discover that both of my parents had been diagnosed with cancer and would soon die. And it will also share the dawning perception of a nineteen-year-old – after my parents’ slow and hard deaths that year only six months apart, and after hospital and funeral expenses were paid – that my younger brother (still in high school) and I, the remnants of what had been a fairly happy family, were flat broke, jobless, and seemingly without a viable future. None of my story of this is in Flashback, per se, yet it’s all there behind the book. The emotions are there.

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