Marina Keegan’s literary promise – cut short at 22 by a fatal car crash – shines through in these bright, questing stories and essays
Marina Keegan’s writing, at its best, vibrates. It overflows with what it is to be young, intelligent, ambitious, uncertain… and alive. This slim collection brings together the published and unpublished work of the Yale graduate: nine stories and nine essays, including the title piece written for the Yale Daily News, a musing on the hugeness of the future, where she urges fellow students – and, you feel, herself – to remember that this is only one step among many. “We’re so young. We’re 22 years old. We have so much time.”
Time was, it turns out, something she didn’t have. Five days after graduation, she was killed in a car accident, when her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel. It is nearly impossible to read this collection without that knowledge getting entangled with the words on the page. The stories carry a strange and sizeable weight as a result, with many feeling as if they foreshadow what was to come. In one, a daughter reassures her anxious mother that she’ll be the one driving to a party instead of her boyfriend. In another, a girl has to deal with the emotional aftermath of the death in a car accident of the boy she was dating. Their relationship was brief and uneasy but now it has been permanently reframed by his death, by the abrupt ending of their story.
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Time was, it turns out, something she didn’t have. Five days after graduation, she was killed in a car accident, when her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel. It is nearly impossible to read this collection without that knowledge getting entangled with the words on the page. The stories carry a strange and sizeable weight as a result, with many feeling as if they foreshadow what was to come. In one, a daughter reassures her anxious mother that she’ll be the one driving to a party instead of her boyfriend. In another, a girl has to deal with the emotional aftermath of the death in a car accident of the boy she was dating. Their relationship was brief and uneasy but now it has been permanently reframed by his death, by the abrupt ending of their story.
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