After a car accident I pretended to have amnesia as a joke. My husband looked at the floor and told me he was my brother — and it took me eleven days to work out that the only thing I had actually forgotten was the two hours before the crash, and that those two hours were the whole story.

And the whole time, there had been a real hole, and I had been too busy performing to look into it.

PART 3

Retrograde amnesia around a head injury is completely ordinary. My neurologist explained it to me twice and did not find any of it dramatic. The brain does not file the last stretch before an impact. Sometimes it’s minutes. Sometimes it’s most of a day. It often does not come back.

Mine was about eleven hours. Waking up on the Tuesday to the crash.

She told me, kindly, that people find the gap distressing out of proportion to its size, and that I should not go hunting in it, and that if it came back it would come back on its own.

I did not tell her that I had spent four days pretending the gap was my whole life. I have never been able to work out whether that was shame or strategy and I suspect it was both.