Marina Keegan’s writing, at its best, vibrates. It overflows with what it is to be young, intelligent, ambitious, uncertain… and alive. This slim collection brings together the published and unpublished work of the Yale graduate: nine stories and nine essays, including the title piece written for the Yale Daily News, a musing on the hugeness of the future, where she urges fellow students – and, you feel, herself – to remember that this is only one step among many. “We’re so young. We’re 22 years old. We have so much time.”
Time was, it turns out, something she didn’t have. Five days after graduation, she was killed in a car accident, when her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel. It is nearly impossible to read this collection without that knowledge getting entangled with the words on the page. The stories carry a strange and sizeable weight as a result, with many feeling as if they foreshadow what was to come. In one, a daughter reassures her anxious mother that she’ll be the one driving to a party instead of her boyfriend. In another, a girl has to deal with the emotional aftermath of the death in a car accident of the boy she was dating. Their relationship was brief and uneasy but now it has been permanently reframed by his death, by the abrupt ending of their story.
There is so much promise in these stories, so much poise. While some of it has that familiar “writers’ programme” polish, her own voice shines through. She has a keen eye and an emotional intelligence; she pins down the self-questioning and introspection of being in your early 20s, of being in your first serious relationship, that state of being on the cusp of something big.
There are some lovely understated moments here, particularly an exchange in “Winter Break”, where a girl finds that the glow of her new relationship allows her to understand her mother better as a person. In some of the stories you can feel Keenan experimenting and testing herself, pushing beyond the familiar, trying new things, and while some of these experiments are more successful than others, in the best of them there is an energy at play, a kind of bubbling brightness. The abiding feeling after reading these stories and essays is, oddly, not one of sadness but one of hope.
The Opposite of Loneliness is published by Simon & Schuster, £8.99. Click here to buy it from £7.19
