Two years ago, Marina Keegan's life brimmed with promise. She was graduating with high honors from Yale University, already a precocious writer about to take up a job at the New Yorker.
She had a play that was about to be produced. She had sparked a national conversation about whether graduates should seek meaning or money.
In keeping with that early promise, Keegan's first book, "The Opposite of Loneliness," is scheduled to be published in a few days. The title comes from an essay that she wrote in the graduation issue of the Yale newspaper; it was viewed online more than 1 million times.
The book is a triumph, but also a tragedy — for it's posthumous.
"I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short," Keegan wrote in one of her poems.
As a senior, she wrote an aching protest on the website of the New York Times about the rush of students into well-paying jobs on Wall Street — not because of innate interest but because that route was lucrative and practical. One-quarter of Yale graduates entering the job market were going into finance or consulting, and Keegan saw this as a surrender of youthful talents and dreams to the altar of practicality.
"Standing outside a freshman dorm, I couldn't find a single student aspiring to be a banker, but at commencement this May, there's a 50 percent chance I'll be sitting next to one," she wrote. "This strikes me as incredibly sad."
Keegan recalled being paid $100 to attend a recruiting session at Yale by a hedge fund: "I got this uneasy feeling that the man in the beautiful suit was going to take my Hopes and Dreams back to some lab to figure out the best way to crush them."
For my part (and Keegan probably would have agreed), I think that we need bankers and management consultants as well as writers and teachers, and there's something to be said for being practical. Some financiers find fulfillment, and it's also true that such a person may be able to finance far more good work than a person who becomes an aid worker. Life is complicated.
Yet Keegan was right to prod us all to reflect on what we seek from life, to ask these questions, to recognize the importance of passions as well as paychecks — even if there are no easy answers.
A young man named Adam Braun struggles with similar issues in another new book that complements Keegan's. Braun began working at a hedge fund the summer he was 16, charging unthinkingly toward finance, and after graduation from Brown University he joined Bain Consulting.
Yet Braun found that although he had "made it," his heart just wasn't in his work. He kept thinking of a boy, a beggar who had never been to school, whom he had met on a trip to India. Braun asked the boy what he wanted most in the world.
The boy replied, "a pencil."
Braun quit his job to found Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit that builds schools around the world. His new book, "The Promise of a Pencil," recounts "how an ordinary person can create extraordinary change."
I hope this year's graduates will remember the message in the books by Keegan and Braun about seeking fulfillment, zest and passion in life. This search for purpose in life is an elemental human quest — yet one we tend to put off. And we never know when time will run out.
For Marina Keegan, that was just five days after graduation. Her boyfriend was driving her to her father's 55th birthday party on Cape Cod. Though he was neither speeding nor drinking, he fell asleep at the wheel. They both were wearing seat belts, but her seat was fully reclined so that the seat belt was less effective.
The car hit a guard rail and rolled over twice. The boyfriend was unhurt; Keegan was killed.
Her mother, Tracy Keegan, combed the wreckage. Marina's laptop had been smashed, but the hard drive was extracted to mine the writings so important to her — and now preserved in her book.
After the crash, Marina's parents immediately forgave and comforted her boyfriend, who faced criminal charges in her death. They asked that he not be prosecuted for vehicular homicide — for that, they said, would have broken their daughter's heart. Charges were dropped, and the boyfriend sat by her parents at the memorial service.
The book has been lovingly edited by Anne Fadiman, who taught Keegan writing at Yale. "Every aspect of her life," Fadiman says, "was a way of answering that question: How do you find meaning in your life?"
Fadiman says that Marina would be "beyond thrilled" at having a book published, but would add: "Please pay attention to my ideas. Don't read this book just because I'm dead."
Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for the New York Times.
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