Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Book Review: The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories by Marina Keegan

 The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories 

Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. 
As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.
Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.

I read this for Chapters/Indigo's #WorldsBiggestBookClub on Twitter. The discussion will be on June 25th, 3 p.m. EST. 

I really enjoyed reading this book. Marina Keegan showed a lot of promise in her writing and it's sad that she will never write anything else. Her stories are well-written and have a raw honesty to them that is impossible to fake. Her non-fiction work is excellent as well and through them, Marina is revealed to have been an intelligent, thoughtful young woman who could write about damn near anything and write about it well. Her work is not perfect but it shows the great potential she had and, over time, she could have have been a literary giant. 


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