So, what about Marina?

Marina entered this world on October 25, 1989. During her childhood, Marina's life revolved around her family in Wayland, Massachusetts, her friends and teachers at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School (BB&N), sailing, and camp. Oh, and Harry Potter. Lots of Harry Potter. Even (or especially) as a kid, Marina has been described as “a kind, intelligent, invested young woman and a loyal, perceptive friend known for her quick wit and irrepressible energy.”  Marina's sixth grade teacher, who named her daughter after Marina, said it best:

“She stands out in my memory as one of the most remarkable students I have ever taught. She was the first “Marina” I had met, and I always felt that that name suited her with her blue flashing eyes with their dark lashes, her long hair, and her easy flowing way with words [...] I loved Marina's inquisitive mind, and her fearless way of challenging opinions and seeking knowledge.”

Marina, solemnly sworn to being up to no good, once made a Hogwarts acceptance letter and slipped it in the mail slot of one of her fellow Harry Potter-obsessed friends. She printed it on parchment paper–and even burned the edges of the letter. Her friend was thrilled, a little shocked, and in disbelief. We're not sure if Marina ever fessed up…

Journaling was a huge part of Marina's personal, intellectual, civic, and professional life, from her childhood onwards. The practice pushed Marina to be in constant interaction with the world around her.  In turn, journaling helped Marina better understand her place as a human, writer, activist, and student. Marina used her journals to give space to her thoughts and to consciously live an examined life. 

After her graduation from BB&N, she became one of the youngest staffers on the Obama 2008 campaign before entering Yale College. What some people who have read The Opposite of Loneliness don't know is that, for a long time, Marina was torn between art and activism. She wrote about her dual interests in an application for a teaching  job:

“For a while, I was caught. Caught between impulses to create and to improve. At Yale, I'm an artist and an activist - perpetually questioning the morality of writing stories and making theatre in a city where students suffer from massive achievement gaps and workers struggle to secure a just living wage. Yet four years after moving to New Haven, this quandary of passion has shaped me, pushed me and expanded me beyond viewing art and activism as mutually exclusive. As President of my school's largest activist organization. The Yale College Democrats, I've lobbied and campaigned for social justice issues across the country - leading over 200 active members to fight for change. Yet I've also acted in over nine student productions, had a story aired on NPR and written a play performed in a New York City theatre festival. I used to believe I had to choose between my creative and political convictions - but I know now that I'm most effective when I combine my passions.”

At Yale, Marina the Artist and Marina the Activist flourished. Over four years, she wrote for The Yale Daily News, the Yale Herald, The Yale Globalist International Relations Magazine and the Yale Daily News Magazine. The piece of writing that Marina was most proud of was "Even Artichokes Have Doubts," a long-form piece (of journalism) written for The Yale Daily News on Yale students who cast their dreams aside to take financial consulting  jobs. Now in The Opposite of Loneliness, the essay was picked up by Kevin Roose. He asked Marina to write another version of the essay for publication in The New York Times  Dealbook series.  Marina wrote about the piece in retrospect:

“The work I’m most proud of is with regard to the topic of consulting and finance recruitment at universities. I was absolutely shocked and horrified by the number of my peers entering these fields and felt like something needed to be said: so last fall I set about interviewing more than 30 students, professors and administrators, (an actual 30, not a Mike Daisy 30), learning everything I could about the phenomenon and writing a 4000 word cover story for the school paper. I had no idea that the piece would garner so much attention – and I was thrilled to be asked to write a similar piece for The New York Times and to speak on the topic with All Things Considered. I began to receive hundreds of emails from students (and bankers) around the country and started to realize the potential for affecting change through this kind of journalism. As a political activist and organizer, I was often frustrated by the small impacts of phone-banks and (too small) rallies and it was interesting for me to begin to view journalism as a similar, and not separate, avenue for real social change.”

 Marina's writing extends far beyond what you can read in The Opposite of Loneliness. Marina also wrote and performed original poetry with a spoken word poetry group called WORD. She furthered her passion for the performing arts from high school by performing in nine student productions throughout her four years as an undergrad. She wrote two plays, Fast Pass and Utility Monster, and one musical called Independents. 

Anne Fadiman, who taught Marina in "Writing About Oneself, "a class in which Marina produced much of her now-published writing, spoke at Marina's memorial service:

“More than a million people have read “The Opposite of Loneliness” and stared at the photograph, now iconic, of Marina in her yellow coat. In the version of that picture on our program, Marina looks elegant and ladylike, ready to have tea, perhaps, with the president of Yale. But if you saw the full frame, you’d see she’s wearing, as was her custom, a really short miniskirt and boots. Let us not forget either of those Marinas. It is wonderful that strangers are reading her work. That’s whom writers write for, after all – not for their friends, not for their family. But her fame is blurring her outline and sanding off her sharp edges and making her into an angel instead of a strong, fierce, brave woman. Let us therefore work hard to remember both the Marina with the blindingly bright résumé and the Marina who said I’ll flaunt my great legs, I won’t take any shit, I won’t say what you want to hear – UNLESS I BELIEVE IT.”

Marina left her physical form on May 26, 2012. As Deborah Margolin, Marina’s playwriting professor wrote:

Marina Keegan and Death are two incompatible concepts for me. The parallax between them is vast and unbridgeable. This was a young woman of outrageous intellect, probity, humor, hope. Her brilliance had a restive and relentless quality. She was all legs, all brains. She loved language. Her mindset was richly taut and profoundly casual at once. I never met anyone who combined those two contradictory qualities so completely.

This child insisted on herself by way of insisting on hope, on possibility, on beauty, on dirt, on the very nature of personal responsibility. She looked at the world we've given her, the humbled, ravishing wreck of it and thought: How can I best help? She argued with herself about the value of art in the face of atrocity, and wrote beautiful plays that argued back.

I have a sign-in book that students must fill out whenever I'm teaching a class, and the categories include name, major, year of graduation, phone number, address, and always and finally, some impossible and demented category like Something Everyone Seems to Understand But You Don't, or whatever. In the last entry I have from beautiful Marina, this demented category was:

Everything That Ever Happened To You In Your Whole Life

Marina wrote: “Read a lot and met great people. Was very lucky.”

The word LUCKY was underlined.