The Opposite of Loneliness.By Marina Keegan.Simon and Schuster; 208 pages; $23. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk 
ESSAYISTS write most convincingly about what they know. In “The Opposite of Loneliness” Marina Keegan writes movingly both about what she knows, and about what she will never get to know. In 2012 Ms Keegan was killed in a car accident five days after she graduated from Yale. She was 22. The lyrical Anne Fadiman, her former professor and author of “Ex Libris”, has gathered and edited her short stories and essays into a poignant posthumous publication.
Ms Keegan takes on the meaningful and mundane with wit and grace. Her words alternatively swagger and tiptoe. She writes about her car, whose interior underwent “the vehicular equivalent of a midlife crisis”, devolving from dignified to disastrously disorganised. Her essay about coeliac disease, the food allergy that kept her from devouring every delicious “collapsible calorie”, is a deft portrayal of children’s failure to appreciate parents’ passion for protecting them.
Her short stories are taut and layered. The best, “Cold Pastoral”, is narrated by a young woman, who is asked to eulogise her sort-of-boyfriend after he abruptly dies. It chillingly explores how losing someone elevates them in one’s memory.
Ms Keegan’s work will touch a special chord with readers who recently attended university or watched their children navigate its shores. She captures the sense of community that people feel there when she describes it as the “opposite of loneliness”. She rails against financial firms for picking off so many of her peers. By graduation a quarter of her classmates had signed up with consultancies and banks, opting for an easy recruiting process and lucrative salary instead of retaining their commitment to creativity and social impact. In 2011 she published a version of this impassioned appeal in the New York Times.
Reading this book is both heartbreaking and entertaining. It reveals a woman who tried to balance expectations of greatness with anxieties about falling short. In an essay, “Song for the Special”, she confesses that she grew up thinking she would change the world. But she comes to recognise how much competition there is to living a life with consequence. Unflappable, Ms Keegan still hoped for the endurance of her “own tangible trace”.