Many years after a major national tragedy, a woman can describe in vivid, precise detail exactly where she was standing, what she was wearing, and who she was with when she first heard the news, and she is completely confident this memory is accurate down to the smallest detail — though she has never had it independently verified. What is this?

This is a flashbulb memory: an unusually vivid, detailed memory of the moment of learning about an intensely significant event, held with strong subjective confidence — exactly the pattern the phenomenon's own text describes, including the important caveat that this confidence does not guarantee accuracy, since flashbulb memories are known to fade or distort over time despite feeling exceptionally reliable. It is not a flashback, which would be a sudden, intrusive, involuntary re-experiencing rather than a single memory recalled voluntarily. It is not confabulation, since nothing is being actively invented to fill a gap. And it is not, on this description alone, established as a false memory, since a real event genuinely occurred and she is recalling it, even if some details may have drifted over time.