Humans can vividly recall and re-experience events from their past, and these are commonly referred to as episodic or autobiographical memories. fMRI experiments reliably associate autobiographical event recall with activity in a network of “default” or “core” brain regions. However, as prior studies have relied upon covert (silent) recall procedures, current understanding may be hampered by methodological limitations that obscure dynamic effects supporting moment-to-moment content retrieval. Here, fMRI participants (N = 40) overtly (verbally) recalled memories for ∼2-minute periods. The content of spoken descriptions was categorized using a variant of the Autobiographical Interview procedure (Levine et al. 2002) and temporally re-aligned with BOLD data so activity accompanying the recall of different details could be measured. Replicating prior work, sustained effects associated with autobiographical recall periods—which are insensitive to the moment-to-moment content of retrieval—fell primarily within ca...