I recently finished The Opposite of Loneliness, a collection of essays and stories from a budding writer who died of a tragic car crash after graduation.
There are profound essays from Keegan herself as a student of Yale, critical and hopeful that all her fellow students pursue things that ring true to themselves instead of taking the easier paths. There are also many short stories through the eyes of different people, an exterminator, a strange old lady who takes off her clothes, teens in love or indifferent of love.
There’s one common theme in all these stories is that the characters themselves experience loneliness in their own way. An emptiness that never quite seems to fulfill. In this way the book is kind of depressing, but I enjoyed Keegan’s easy to digest style of writing that never comes off as pretentious or older than she seems. She writes in the voices and visions of each of her characters in a way that puts the reader in their shoes.
It’s a shame that we will never truly know what the things Keegan could have wrote as she grew older. It will be a literary world we’ll never know.
Tiana Feng 