Twenty-three-year-old Jillian Reilly went to southern Africa in 1993 at the close of apartheid, desperate to do good. She only

planned to stay for six months, but the promise of playing savior was just too great. Jillians career in the aid industry flourished. To all the world, she looked like a successful do-gooder -

even a precocious one. If only she werent being suffocated by her own sense of futility. Jillian left southern Africa in 2000 quite clear that the only person she could save was herself.

Shame is her story: the story of a young American woman growing up, and old, in Africa....