How long have you been imagining what your future will look like? All humans write out elaborate plots in their heads for what is to come: Saturday mornings flipping pancakes with chocolate chip faces, jobs with the comfy, swirly chairs and summers spent at your pale blue lake house. We spend years imagining precisely what we want and then contemplating how in the world we can obtain it.
The Opposite of Lonelinessis not about any of that. However, it was written by a young girl who had that all ripped away. Marina Keegan graduated from Yale with the fiery determination to be a writer. A mere few days after graduation, she died in an accident, never being granted the chance to fulfill her dream. Upon her death, her loved ones put together some of her writings into a book, The Opposite of Loneliness.
Within the book, her teacher explains that Marina would not want to be remembered because she was dead, rather because she was good. Her writing isn’t just interesting because the taste of death has been sprinkled on top, it is enticing all within itself.
Marina’s writing begins with collections of short fiction stories that are blatantly honest and dripping with great imagery. In her works, she discusses the struggles of trying to age gracefully, acknowledgement of past relationships within a budding one, remaining just within war and so much more. Her writing is so incredibly diverse with diction, imagery, focus and style that I couldn’t wait to move onto the next story but was dreading when the one I was reading would end.
After the fiction component, there is a selection of nonfiction pieces. It was heart-wrenching but laugh inducing because I recognized so many of her thoughts such as her childhood friends, which I had forgotten their names until I reread them.
Reading this book, hearing her certainty in something grand but not quite having the ability to see it, or know how to achieve it, refocused my attention on all that I have been given. With the time I have remaining, I am going to do all that I can because I never know how much of my future I will get to see.
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