How to Handle Memory Gaps in Your Memoir

Today’s post is by writer and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison. Join her on Wednesday, October 16, for the online class Mastering Trauma Scenes to Improve Your Memoir.

How do you write about an event when your memories of it are scattered, shattered, or gone? It’s one of the most frequent questions trauma survivors ask me.

Before I share what to do, let’s talk about why traumatic memories are often fractured and how their disjointedness makes them difficult to work with. Under normal circumstances, the events our brain sees as important are processed and stored by the hippocampus. Situations associated with strong emotions get priority. They’re followed by things we’ve rehearsed throughout the day. Much of the rest gets scrapped. The memories formed from this process frequently play like short, relatively complete movies in our heads.

In life-threatening situations, stress hormones course through our veins. Early on, they intensify our awareness as the amygdala imprints the emotions associated with this moment into its database, along with what it feels are relevant details. That’s why so many trauma survivors have vivid sensory memories, especially of the earliest parts of a traumatic experience.

Eventually, the system overloads. Emotions shut down. The memory recording system short circuits. That’s why we might be able to conjure snippets of what happened but not their sequence, or we encounter irretrievable blank spots.

Here are three ways to handle those short circuits and blank spots in your memoir.

1. Admit the lapse.

Write the memory to the best of your ability. Then, acknowledge any lapses. Here’s a great example from Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club.

I don’t remember who we got farmed out to or for how long. I was later told that we’d stayed for a long time with the childless couple who bred birds. Some memory endures of the screened-in breezeway with green slatted blinds all around … but the faces of my hosts refuse to be conjured.

You can also use well-placed metaphors to write around a gap or through a dissociative moment—something Sarah Perry does in After the Eclipse, which takes place in the aftermath of her mother’s murder.

Memory recedes here, falling into a hospital-white mist, an inconsistent curtain that rolls over the hours, obscuring some moments, parting to let others through.

Mary Karr applies a similar technique in this reflective moment that sets up the journey she’s about to take us on:

When the truth would be unbearable the mind often blanks out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness.

2. Do some research.

While the above strategies can let you off the hook, sometimes the facts matter. If this is the case, conduct some research. For missing events, interview eyewitnesses and find resources that might contain supporting details. Sarah Perry studied court records, police reports, and newspaper articles and completed dozens of interviews with people who knew her and her mother.

When selecting interview subjects, choose emotionally safe individuals who will hold your confidence and, ideally, are not in your memoir. That’s because characters in your story might be emotionally invested in how they or other characters are portrayed.

While I’ve already offered tips for dealing with dissociative moments, sometimes readers need more than crafty metaphors or reflective moments. That’s because memoir readers live vicariously through your story. Articulating the emotions underneath the surface can not only enrich your scenes, but also help readers understand their own experiences.

One way to “research” the emotions you might have suppressed is to pay attention to what comes up as you write. These feelings may begin as a tightness in the jaw, shoulders, or stomach, or perhaps a heaviness in the chest. If this occurs, pause and think of an organ in your body—ideally not your stomach or heart—that needs to speak. Don’t think too much about this. Just record your first choice, then ask what it has to say about the situation.

Afterward, check out this article on the emotions and five elements in Chinese Medicine to see which emotion this organ is associated with. Most writers I’ve worked with have discovered a surprising relationship between the organ and their scene’s central conflict.

Other prompts that can uncover feelings you’ve divorced yourself from:

On the surface, I felt nothing, but underneath, I felt …If I could’ve felt something, it would’ve been …

However, before going down this path, one red flag that you’re dealing with high trauma is a complete lack of emotions around an event that others might find deeply troubling. If you know or discover you’re writing about highly traumatic events, processing these emotions with a counselor or somatic experiencing professional could benefit you and your story.

3. Speculate.

If research doesn’t seem feasible, speculate. While memoirs can’t be made up, you can write speculative scenes that imagine what could’ve happened, provided you make clear that the scene is imagined.

In her memoir Playing with Dynamite, Sharon Harrigan signals speculation though the phrase, “It could’ve been like this,” as well as a shift in tense, as she does in the setup for this speculative scene about the night her father died in a car crash.

I was home asleep, but I’d always imagined that night this way. Like all Michigan winters this one’s cold. No snow though. Not yet…

You don’t have to stop at a speculative scene. Speculative memoir is an entire subgenre that can crack open your story’s form and function, something Matt Homrich-Knieling talks about in this post for Brevity. 

Parting thoughts

Crafting scenes from traumatic events is tricky. Writing about one traumatic event can easily beget more writing about traumatic events, especially for people diagnosed with PTSD and CPTSD. That’s because hypervigilant nervous systems can get stuck in activated states where they replay painful, scary moments as a way to stay safe. While some of this darker writing might be important for your healing, not everything we go through or write about is meant for an external reader. Sometimes, we write to understand or close a memory gap for ourselves, and, in doing so, we find our footing and discover what the reader truly needs from us.

It’s also possible your story isn’t about the memory itself, but why you can’t remember it. Then again, maybe what you’ve written is all you need. In that case, your framing of the material is what’s important.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, October 16, for the online class Mastering Trauma Scenes to Improve Your Memoir.