Alice Munro’s Passive Voice

It made me angry, that she required this of me, as if she were still my aunt Lydia. Before she was the patient, my aunt Lydia never looked like this, pitiful and vulnerable as though she were a newly hatched chicken. Before, she had her own car.

He glanced at Anna. She sat remote in her seat, not looking at him. She had become quieter ever since she started telling the story, he realised. As though it disturbed her—just like it was disturbing him.

An older woman came forward to tell the story of her daughter, Chelsey. I heard audible sobs when she revealed—partway through her story—that she spoke on behalf of her daughter only because her daughter was no longer here. Chelsey had committed suicide, never having recovered from the damage of what Larry had done.

It is a story difficult to put into words, this. I never tell it, in fact, or never have before. I told no one at the time, not my friends, not my family: there seemed no way to translate what had happened into grammar and syntax.