Andrea sometimes worried that the shiniest parts of her personality were actually coping mechanisms. She felt that she had spent years moving through the world “as if I was giving a hundred dollars to each person I connected with, in the hopes that on the day I needed to borrow ten dollars, I could.”

“Writing is a way of convincing yourself perhaps that you’re doing something about this,” she said.

Alice Munro’s Passive Voice

Andrea felt as if her mother had found a disease that was almost too convenient, a permanent forgetting. She told me, “I was kind of mad at her, like, Oh, yeah. You found your way out.”

In her illness, though, Alice seemed to access her emotions more freely, a shift that Jenny attributed, in part, to the fact that she wasn’t writing. “She wasn’t putting every difficulty in her life through that machine that turned things into gold,” Jenny said.