No matter what the situation, I never feel quite right when people my age die. You shouldn't die at seventeen or nineteen or twenty-two. Your parents should never have to bury you. What always gets me when I read about school shootings or massacres or bombings involving young people is the small description a family member or friend gives of them. If you die at 80, you have a detailed obituary with your accomplishments and the family you left behind, but what can you leave behind when you've barely started to live? "She was a kind soul." "He was studying to be a doctor." Most people who die young don't have much left to remember them by, but Marina Keegan did. She left behind an impressive body of work that became this book, and that's how we'll remember her.

Her untimely death notwithstanding, Keegan was a good writer. Heck, she might've been a great writer one day. More than that, she had potential. I felt like I was reading someone who could have been an authentic voice for my generation, a writer who knew how I felt. I read in the introduction by her professor that Marina refused to compromise on anything. She knew how she wanted to sound, and she fought to keep her voice hers and not have it become someone else's. I personally think she was correct to fight so hard. Keegan had a funny, clever voice. Her observations about life and love feel real and genuine. They feel like something a girl in her early twenties would write.

I did think the nonfiction was superior to the fiction, but I still enjoyed both. Keegan knew how to tell her stories, and simple things such as all the junk in her car became poignant and interesting in her hands. She would have made a great memoirist. The best piece by far, however, is the title essay, her Yale graduation speech, The Opposite of Loneliness. If you never read this book, you might still hear parts of this speech. It was quoted by someone at my high school graduation (which was a little funny to me since I finished this book that morning). It is hard not to feel something when you read her hopes and dreams for the future and her reassurances this is just the start.

“We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There's this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out - that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it's too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.” It is hard to read that and believe that four days later this girl was dead. It doesn't seem possible. What she said is still true though. It is still true.

I have heard people debate this book's literary merit and whether or not is any good or if we just read it because she was young and talented and died too soon but left behind a famous speech. I don't think those things matter. The people who write books shape them, no matter the circumstances. Would The Bell Jar still be an illuminating take on mental illness if Sylvia Plath was in her right mind? Would The Great Gatsby still be luxurious and full of excess if F. Scott Fitzgerald hadn't lived the life he had in the 20s? Those things did happen, and we do have those books. How much we have to look at the author is for each reader to decide, but it isn't nothing. Especially here, it isn't nothing.

Highly recommended!