The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan

The Opposite of Loneliness

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life

The Opposite of Loneliness brings together Marina Keegan’s short stories and essays, both previously published and unpublished, to great effect. Personally, I have rarely found the draw of short stories alluring. I see Edgar Allen Poe as overtly sombre and more akin to something I would have read at school, and Ali Smith unsatisfactory – without the chapters of back story I can find her work clipped, and care little for the characters. However – Marina Keegan shows masterful skill over the short story and for the first time had me rapt. After each story I felt as though I needed a break, to digest and wrap myself in the characters for a moment. They did not appear to be the beginnings of a novel, each one, in a chapter sized length, is a whole and complete journey –rarely resolved by our writer, however never concluded predictably. I loved Reading Aloud, where sixty-something Anna strips as she reads for twenty-something Sam, and also Cold Pastoral, an examination of how you might feel when someone you are sleeping with passes away, when you do not have the title of “girlfriend” or “wife” – how are you meant to feel?

It cannot be said that Keegan is narrowed to one style – The Opposite of Loneliness shows her style to be far ranging. Challenger Deep is horror-esque in the details, what it would be like to be 36,000 feet deep in the ocean in pitch black with food stocks depleting, and then later, Keegan changes gear and talks us through her first car, and what it smelt like and what it saw in Stability in Motion. The key to a body of work like this thriving when it is written by someone so young, and this is something that was touched upon by Anne Fadiman, is that, whilst I’m sure she could, she does not try to dazzle you with her sophistication, or cleverness – instead, with fresh and pure writing, she captures exactly how it feels to be 20 or 17 or 22.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.

Marina graduated from Yale in 2012 and was due to start her inevitably successful career at the New Yorker when she died in a tragic car accident. And whilst the word tragic is sometimes overused, and potentially cliché – I would argue that it is entirely pertinent. Whilst I considered leaving out this detail as I believe her body of work is so much more than the fact it is posthumous – it would thrive if Marina herself were publishing it, but I believe it makes her work even more poignant. Part of this comes in the finality; we will likely never see any more of her work. Further to this, death is a recurrent theme in her work, and Marina’s death adds extra weight to her comments about her future children and the parties she will throw when she’s thirty.