Marina Keegan and I Would Have Been Friends
9:01 PM
I've been typing then erasing, restarting then erasing for the past fifteen minutes not quite sure how to articulate my words. Marina Keegan was many things one of them being an extraordinary writer. Her works were so inspiring that her last eassy for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral with more than 1.4 million hits.
Marina was 22 when she graduated from Yale University and five days later she was killed in a car accident. The irony of that. Her essays and fiction stories quite often depicted her own thoughts about death and the short amount of time we have.
"Do you wanna leave soon? No, I want enough time to be in love with everything...
And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short." ---Marina Keegan, from the poem "Bygones"
For those who haven't caught on I just finished reading "The Oppisite of Loneliness," which are collections of her work such as fiction stories she wrote as well as nonfiction work of her own thoughts and opinions.
I don't want to spoil anything for anyone my intent is to more share my thoughts about the book and my opinions of Mariana Keegan.
The start of the book was done very elegantly by Anne Fadiman a Yale professor who helped add all of her collections together. You really get a sense of who Marina was. One quote that really stood out from Anne who wrote a short introduction at the start of the book:
"When she read her work aloud around our seminar table, it would make us snort with laughter, and then it would turn on a dime and break our hearts." -Anne Fadiman
The thing with Marina was that she was beyond her years yet she wrote like a 22 year old. She was able to write about the difficulties and experiences of our generation in a way people of all ages could relate to. There were times while reading I would nod my head and say aloud "Yes!!" because she was so spot on with how she articulated herself and I could completely relate to her.
From the tone of her stories you get the sense that Marina was a romantic. On the day of her graduation she even said,
"I will live for love and the rest will take care of itself." She had a very naive side that actually made you look at life so much simpler by the way she articulated it into words.
I can't stop staring at the cover which is a picture of her half grinning, with redish mid-length straight hair, in an unbuttoned mustard colored pea coat, a white baggy sweater underneath that was over top a short floral dress.
I looked at her and saw myself. A 22 year old, the same age as myself, with questions and concerns of the world that would never be answered. It made me sad. She seems so alive when reading her words and staring at her face on the cover. Maybe that's the happy ending of Marina Keegan, her words will always in a way keep her alive even if she isn't physically here. That's what I love about literature and writing. A voice can never be lost when it's written down and it leaves a peice of them with the living.
I wish I had known Marina Keegan because I feel like we would have been friends.
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