Keegan's 'Opposite of Loneliness' voices 'all of the feels'

For college seniors on the cusp of graduation, it's often impossible to find the right words to express "all of the feels" one has before graduating: a bittersweet mix of happiness, fear and uncertainty about what happens after a graduation cap is tossed in the air and "the real world" becomes reality.

Yet Marina Keegan, an English major and 2012 Yale grad, could. And she did, with the essay she wrote in May 2012 for the Yale Daily News entitled The Opposite of Loneliness.

"We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness," Keegan, 22, began her essay. "But if we did, I could say that's what I want in life. What I'm grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I'm scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place."

She spoke in a comforting yet poignant voice, giving texture to that "bittersweet" feeling that college students have when they end their school careers. And she ended with optimism, believing that "we're so young" and there is time to "do anything" if only we maintain a sense of possibility.

The essay ended with the hopeful words, "We're in this together, 2012. Let's make something happen to this world."

Keegan's world stopped short five days after her graduation. She died in a car accident while traveling with her boyfriend to Cape Cod for a family event. He was unharmed.

But almost two years since her final essay in the Yale Daily News went viral — receiving more than 1.4 million reads — Keegan's voice speaks again.

This week, nine fiction stories and nine essays penned by Keegan came together in a collection published by Scribner called The Opposite of Loneliness, titled after her famous essay.

Throughout the book, Keegan's voice — casual yet precise — continually selects the perfect words or details to express complex emotions, such as the fear of following the wrong path in life, losing meaningful connections with others and not making a lasting mark on the world. All the while, she remains hopeful in her writing.

Though this is the first book published of Keegan's work, she published a non-fiction piece in The New York Times during her senior year. A short story she wrote in college, Cold Pastoral, was also featured on the New Yorker website posthumously in October 2012.

Keegan had an editorial staff job lined up with the New Yorker when she graduated, and she interned at the publication the summer after her junior year in 2011.

Alanna Okun, 24, a Vassar grad and now an Associate Editor at BuzzFeed, interned with Keegan that summer and says she learned from Keegan how to help her own writing "elucidate more truth."

"She was really good at just kind of picking out these human foibles, like these little things that everyone does but no one names or admits to," Okun says. "… I think she's actually a very kind writer, but (she) would shed light on the human condition, as cliché as that might sound. I really hope that is something that people will discover is there is so much life and spirit in her work, no matter what she's talking about."

Mark Sonnenblick, 24, attended Yale with Keegan and worked with her in English class. The first piece he read of Keegan's was an early draft of a fictional story she wrote called Winter Break, which is featured in the collection and follows a young college woman's relationship to her parents and her long-distance boyfriend.

"I just remember reading it and having it really connect with my experience in just a couple of passages and just going, 'Oh my gosh.' This is something that I totally understand and the way that you put it here is very subtle but … in a very powerful way," Sonnenblick says.

Sonnenblick collaborated with Keegan on her musical Independents, writing the lyrics. The musical premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2012, garnering recognition from The New York Times.

Chloe Sarbib, 24, a 2012 Yale alum and roommate and friend of Keegan's, said even conversationally, Keegan made others feel like they weren't alone in their thoughts by providing the right words for certain experiences and emotions.

"The same wit and life that imbue her writing with liveliness and specificity were present everyday in the way that she moved through the world and the things that she said and did," Sarbib says. "… Her ability to put things into words that are difficult to express but immediately relatable once she crystallizes them, she spoke that way and that's just how she was."

Sarbib and Sonnenblick joined Anne Fadiman, an English professor at Yale, on Wednesday last week at the Yale Bookstore for the first reading from The Opposite of Loneliness.

Fadiman taught Keegan her junior year in a writing seminar called "Writing About Oneself." Fadiman worked with editors at Scribner, Keegan's parents and Keegan's high school English teacher to help select the fiction and non-fiction pieces from the wealth of writings Keegan produced in her short life, which included poems.

Editing Keegan's pieces proved interesting, Fadiman says, since Keegan preferred to revise her own work.

"We had to balance two apparently contradictory goals," Fadiman says. "One, keeping in mind Marina didn't really like having her prose be messed with and second, she was a perfectionist who never would have wanted her prose to be published unless it was polished."

A "single sentence" wasn't cut from Keegan's stories in the collection, Fadiman says.

Shannon Welch, senior editor at Scribner, added that working in concert with Keegan's family and friends helped them create a collection with Keegan's best interests in mind. The end product, she says, serves as a means of keeping Keegan and her "incredible body of work" alive.

"I think Marina's message is incredibly hopeful, optimistic," Welch says. "I think she was an idealist, but she's a practical idealist, and I think that is a common theme for the Millennial generation. Her work really asks important questions, those of herself and the world around her."

Fadiman says she recognized Keegan's writing as "brilliant, heartbreaking and funny" when working with her in class. It's the writing itself that makes Keegan's collection a worthy read, Fadiman says, recognizing that readers might come to the book after hearing of Keegan's tragic end but will stay because of the powerful prose.

"Marina is not the story of her death," Fadiman says. "She is the story of her excellent writing which happened to be published at this time in her life in this form because of her life story."

When interviewed before the reading, Sonnenblick and Sarbib similarly said reading Keegan's work would be an emotional experience, but also a chance to reconnect with a friend.

"Just reading it, you hear her voice so clearly," Sonnenblick says. "And even though I'm the one talking, it definitely feels like I am in some way capturing or getting to experience her voice again."

Haley Goldberg is a senior at the University of Michigan