The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories by Marina Keegan

Here is a book that falls under the "book you chose because of its cover" for the Modern Mrs. Darcy Reading Challenge.

In May, Boomer and I spent a weekend in a little town in northern California to attend my cousin's wedding. It was a beautiful wedding with little jars of homemade jam as favors. :) I got persimmon jam, and Boomer got spicy grape jam. Fun! My aunt was walking around trying to poach the persimmon jam from other tables. I slipped mine into my purse once I figured out what she was up to.

The Sunday after the wedding, we wandered around the little downtown area and browsed in a bookstore where this book caught my eye. I wrote down the title and checked it out from the library. By the way, this is how well Boomer knows me. Once we walked out of the bookstore, he asked, "Do you need to write down any titles in your notebook?" He knows that when I go into bookstores, I find titles that I want to check out of the library. I used to write down the titles while in the bookstore, but I got the stink-eye one too many times from bookstore employees, so now I remember them in my brain until I can write them down.

The author of this book, Marina Keegan, was a writer and very recent graduate of Yale when she died in a car accident. This book is a collection of some of her writings, both fiction and non-fiction. This was a heartbreaking book to read because Keegan's writing is SO good and it is so sad to think that her life was cut so short, and how many stories did she have in her that we will never know?

I really enjoyed her short stories although one of them (The Ingenue) left me feeling grumpy because of the ending. But isn't that a sign of a successful story? That we are emotionally engaged and touched. I usually don't enjoy short stories, but I really enjoyed Keegan's.

I am trying to figure out who I can buy this book for....:)