on Jane Friedman site:

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.