We want an author that gets us, but isn’t too cliché. We want to know someone else feels like we do, but we don’t want to admit that we desire this connection. We just want someone who gets it and can say it, so we can read it and feel better.
Marina Keegan is the only person I have come across that got it. Her collection of short stories, essays and poems, published after her tragic and sudden death at age 22, could make anyone feel as the title says —“The Opposite of Loneliness.”
The book is named after her most famous essay written for her Yale commencement, in which she flawlessly examines that certain feeling you get in college, the feeling that makes it so memorable. This essay, which can be found online, is something memorable in itself, but her complete work is provocative, engaging and above all else, relatable. Her short stories are so vivid that you find yourself piecing together her story with parts of your own life. You find yourself able to feel the love and loss that each character feels. You find yourself staring at a wall, wondering how she so eloquently described a feeling that’s been nagging at you for years.
In her poems, Keegan puts the entirety of one emotion, interaction and experience into a couple of lines. She empathizes with every worry we have about school and jobs and marriage and mortgage and climate change and alcohol and death and assures us that people feel this way for a reason. The best part? She does it without annoying you and without making you feel angsty. Instead, you feel validated.
Reading her collection of stories is like listening to your song over and over again, the one with the lyrics that you swear were written just for you. She understands that people miss class and people get sad. That you might have just turned in a paper doomed to fail. That you might be kicking yourself for missing another chance to talk to the cute boy in your class. That you might be a total failure, and that there’s no way out but through.
But she also understands how much hope there is for everyone. How much talent we are surrounded by. How many caring people surround us. How if you pause and look out your window, if only for a moment, you’re guaranteed to feel a little better.
Marina Keegan wrote something that, no mind the cliché, makes everybody feel like a somebody. This book isn’t the sort of life-changing type that makes you abandon your fears and get up early every morning and become vegan. It’s something that gives you a new look at hope, a new look at people, and makes you feel, even if you are alone, the opposite of loneliness.
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