I just finished reading Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness, a collection of essays and short stories from a Yale graduate who died shortly after graduation in a car crash in 2012.

I don’t know if I would have picked up the book had I not known that the author had died at such a young age – that and she wanted to be a writer. In fact, she already was, with a job lined up at the New Yorker, and a play about to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival. Her last essay for the Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” had received more than four million hits, mostly when others heard of her passing.

While I was on Scribner’s website, looking up a contact for work, it was this title that actually drew me to the posthumous book. She was only two years younger than me when she died. From the introduction, I didn’t think I would like the author’s voice. She seemed over eager, privileged, and too innocent, but I wanted to give her a chance. If I died and somebody published my essays postmortem, I would want someone to give me that chance so I added it to my Kindle queue.  Continue reading →