Published posthumously, Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness is a stirring collection of reflective,
lyrical essays and stories written during her final year of studying at Yale
before her death at the age of 22. The title of the memoir is taken from an
essay Marina had written for the graduation volume of the Yale Daily News in which Marina tragically assures her peers that ‘We’re
so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two
years old. We have so much time.’ The essay grapples with the intangibility of love
and community, which she compares to, ‘When the check is paid and you stay at the
table.’ It’s a manifesto for slowing down, knowing ones worth and valuing the
present tense. The collection is also movingly prefaced by her English teacher,
Anne Fadiman, who recounts an email she once received from the student; inspired
by the excuses of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which Keegan wrote, ‘I’m so sorry
about the delay in writing to you! The fact of the matter is I’ve taken ill after
wearing excessively thing breeches in bad weather- not to mention because of my
toothache, insomnia, gout, cough, boils, inflamed eyes, swollen testicles and
raging epistolophobia.’ I howled with laughter when I first read this. This memoir
has the unique power of transporting you through the full spectrum of emotions.
Keegan’s work is articulate and uniquely enchanting. In
essays such as ‘Stability in Motion’ and ‘Against the Grain’ there is a
distinctly literary depiction of scenes which might appear mundane on first
glance. These are instead injected with the vitality of an excited young writer.
Keegan uses her own vehicle as the site of her ‘Stability in Motion’. This car
was inherited from her grandmother, and it carries her faithfully through her adolescence.
It has a rich tapestry of former owners and is the location of countless coming-of-age
scenes- from her first kiss, to attending drive-in cinemas, discovering
mixtapes and eventually moving out of her childhood home. It becomes loaded with
‘tiny, tiny tinfoil balls’ and ‘an eclectic debris that dribbled gradually into
every corner’ and the collection of random objects assembled in the backseat
holds symbolic significance as a bricolage of her maturation. It’s sensually invigorating,
confessional writing.
‘Against the Grain’ wittily interrogates Keegan’s fraught dietary
history with gluten and her mother’s scholarly investigations into the science
of gluten intolerance, leading her to undertake pioneering charity work within
her local community. Keegan uses her dietary requirements as a springboard for
exploring her relationship with her mother, charting the problem from her youth
right up until she enrols at university. Keegan demonstrates an awareness of her
perpetual proximity to illness and death and the piece is narratively rounded
with a cyclical, considered ending that alludes to a desire to reproduce and
replicate her mother’s maternal self-sacrifice.
‘Why We Care About Whales’ is an ode to beached whales, ‘Blue
whales and fin whales and humpback, sperm, and orca whales: [for which] centrifugal
forces don’t discriminate’. It’s curiously placed in the collection after ‘Against
the Grain’, but underscores Keegan’s ability to write about anything and
everything with searing compassion.
Keegan’s writing is quirky and polished, she is both
self-deprecating and wise beyond her years. Tragic circumstances aside, this collection
is a rousing picture of a sparky young writer on the precipice of greatness.
