Limited Engagement: A Way of Living

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, Limited Engagement 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 Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: "(Ambitious) memoir isn't fundamentally a chronicle of experience; rather, memoir is the story of consciousness contending with experience."