Be Your Own Book Club June 2015: The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan

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"

This book wasn't what I expected. I like essays.  I like to hear people talk about themselves. I'm quick to join in with the internet chorus that agrees, en mass, to like something, to call it good.  I was surprised by my reactions to The Opposite of Loneliness, until I thought about it for awhile, and then I wasn't anymore.

This volume is made of up short stories and essays.  The introduction, written by one of Keegan's writing professors, is as long as many of the works. I learned two technical writing terms in the intro itself, so I was considering this book a win before I'd gotten very far.  It was later, when I was uncomfortable with my lack of interest in the stories, that I appreciated that everything was in such short bites.

Throughout the short stories in particular, there were glimpses of interaction and character development that I really liked, but I was haunted by this nagging feeling that I was missing something.  Across the board, the stories finished weak, and many of them weren't very good. I would get to end, wanting badly to get that "woah" feeling that endings often give me, and I'd feel lost. I was searching for something to connect with, and I was often disappointed. The fact that I felt this way when I wanted so badly to enjoy this book spoke volumes to me.

Where I think Keegan's work does shine is when she is writing from the point of view of a 20-something college student, which she is, forever.  I liked her story about the college girl dealing with the death of her casual boyfriend (although I found the subject matter, and the post-mortem journal-reading, in particular, an eerie prophecy) and how sick she felt, reading his private thoughts about her not comparing to his ex-girlfriend. I found flashes of powerful recognition in the short story about the girl who visits her boyfriend doing summer stock and suspects he's cheating.  The descriptions of being sure you're right and then sure you're imagining it were visceral.  She nailed it.  

I loved this beginning:

The biggest fight in my relationship with Danny regards the absurd claim that he invented the popular middle school phenomenon of saying "cha-cha-cha" after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song- an idea his ingenious sixth-grade brain allegedly spawned in a New Jersey Chuck E. Cheese and watched spread across 1993 America with an unprecedented rapidity.

This is such an perfect way to set up the ultimate annoying one-upper.  What a ridiculous claim- who IS this guy? What IS this relationship? Except...there was no follow through.  He never really got called on his shit.  And now I'm wondering where this phenomenon (still going strong in my first-grade classroom to this day) really came from.

There's also this from the last essay Keegan wrote for the Yale Daily News (the essay that went viral after her untimely death in 2012):

It's not quite love and its not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it's 4 am and no one goes to bed...We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time.

It's not only gorgeous because of the painful irony that Marina Keegan did not have "so much time"...she died only a month or so later.  It's also a really perfect sentiment for the end of college.  The whole essay discusses the fear of leaving the safety of the college support system, and speaks with the gravity and wisdom of a young person who has no idea how young they are, no matter how many times they say it.  That is the biggest praise and criticism I've seen about Keegan's work- it all sounds like she's in her twenties.  

I wonder, a little uneasily, if Keegan would be comfortable with us reading these pieces. They were unfinished, unpublished (aside from the essay from her college newspaper), and her parents and professors just did their best to evaluate what she would have wanted in her published work.  Maybe she was still working out the finer points of some of these endings.  Maybe if she had had more time to develop her style, it would be a different book.

What did you think about The Opposite of Loneliness? Any favorite passages or essays? Am I being too harsh on the quality of the writing?  In the end, I didn't enjoy this book the way I wanted to, but I have spent an entire afternoon and evening writing this review due to how often I keep getting lost in rereading different sections.  I'd love to know what you think!

Now to introduce the July pick: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes.  I've heard good things about this book, and see it on lots of reading challenge lists.  Hopefully it will be a little lighter and a little more plot driven, as has been requested by some of my lovely readers.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading along this year! In the first half of 2015, we've read four books, and I'm hoping to keep going strong.  Happy reading, fabulous ladies!