The Opposite of Loneliness

The Opposite of Loneliness
Author: Marina Keegan
Publisher: Scribner
Pages: 208
Genre: non-fiction, short stories and essays
Published: April 8, 2014
Rating: 2/5 stars
Goodreads link

Description

An affecting and hope-filled posthumous collection of essays and stories from the talented young Yale graduate whose title essay captured the world’s attention in 2012 and turned her into an icon for her generation.

Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.
As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.

Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assem­blage of Marina’s essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.

My thoughts

I wanted to like it more but short story collections en Essays are clearly not my thing.

I liked the writing and the speech in the beginning was amazing, but the short stories and Essays left me unsatisfied. I was just getting to know the characters when the story ended. Sometimes it felt like the story stopped somewhere in the middle and I was like, that can’t be the end. I think I would have liked a novel from Marina because her writing is great but this format is not for me.

Also the topics were not always what I wanted. Some stories were weird and I guess I was expecting something else. I really didn’t know what to expect when picking up this book. Sometimes, especially the essays got a bit boring. It took me a long time to read this book.

I have mixed emotions on this book.

This was definitely not a bad book! It was just not for me.