Few of our memories are in sharp detail like this. But that’s OK; you can work with it. Photo Credit: sunshineband via Compfight cc
While writing creative nonfiction, students will say to me, “I don’t remember the details.”
We creative nonfiction writers are sometimes under the assumption that we have to remember everything in Technicolor sharpness in order to write about it. Details are great, and when we can remember specific moments and scenes, it adds so much to the work.
But if there’s something you just aren’t remembering, don’t sweat it. You can actually turn what seems like a flaw into something that can work powerfully for you.
What I recommend is to mine the reasons why you DON’T remember. If you are talking about a major event in your life and you hardly remember anything, that’s a story. What are some reasons why you don’t remember the details? Why do you think your mind is blocking it out?
Explore these reasons on the page through a free-writing session. See what comes of it. There’s no reason why in an essay or in a section of memoir you cannot say right on the page, “Here’s this thing that happened. I remember so little of it, and here are some reasons why.”
Let me know if it works!
If You Have Five Seconds to Spare 
What I always find especially interesting is how members of a family remember the same event/thing so differently. That then leads one to ask, “What is the truth of a memory? Yours or mine?” The answer, it seems, would be both. Individually, we bring our own perspectives, our own agendas, or own whatever to memory.