Limited Engagement

<p>Life is like a theater run: a limited engagement. And her approach to life as author Jacquelyn Shah renders it in her memoir-essay collection is grounded in limited engagement with the world and its people. Not a tell-all how-to or straightforward chronological narrative and not a work from the woe-is-me angle <em>Limited Engagement</em> is a creative exploration of how she came to be rooted in living and writing after a failed suicide attempt at age twenty incited by a conviction that existence is absurd. Dubbing it a gallimaufry (jumble or medley of things) Shah has developed a work whose innards consist of sundry gobbets: narrative; quotes; excerpts of letters; poems; critiques and grievances; historical tidbits; lists; metaphor and language play. She subscribes to what David Shields said in his <em>Reality Hunger: A Manifesto</em>: (Ambitious) memoir isn't fundamentally a chronicle of experience; rather memoir is the story of consciousness contending with experience.</p>