Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness
With such a provocative title, how could I not pick it up?
I remember reading Keegan’s essay by the same name when it first went viral, a few days after her tragic death at 22. I remember being struck, by her articulation, her sentences, her wisdom, but how she knew what she wanted. And although we never met, I can’t help but feel a connection to her, that her angst and my angst are the same. I came across the title again in a free-verse poem by someone on tumblr, and learned that her works had been turned into a book.
And though I really want to like it, I can’t help but feel that in some cruel twist of fate or irony, it was her death that made her famous. Yes, her essay of the same name was great, timely and beautiful, but ultimately it was just something that would have been otherwise fated to end up in the archives of some Yalie’s personal collection, or in some Yalie collectibles section in the library. It was good, but did it warrant a book? Did it warrant publishing?
In the end, though I love her work, it did not. Her work got published not because it was some masterpiece of literature or even that it was worth reading in-and-of-itself, but rather because Keegan’s death shrouded it in a finality that gave it the final push towards publication. Her words are permanent, never to change, never to be edited or improved. And while she had raw talent and energy, even at twenty-two I can’t help but feel that she was robbed—and, had she survived that fatal car crash on the New England coast that day in 2012, her book would have never been published.
I wish she had lived—not for some selfless hope that she could have brought joy to her family, or changed the world—but for a selfish hope to have been able to see her raw talent perfected and improved upon, and maybe in ten or twenty years, read a novel written by a professional Keegan, rather than her dead, tragic self.
