Fierce Joy

Fierce Joy

Fierce Joy: A Memoir is a medical mystery, a spiritual adventure, and a love story. Ellen Schecter had everything she ever wanted: a loving marriage, two great kids, and her dream career writing children's books and television programs. Then her life shattered when she was diagnosed with a painful, potentially fatal disease. Fierce Joy tells the story of how Schecter found a way to be sick without suffering and transformed the loss of her place in the world of work into a quest for her soul. Propelled by illness into a search for new meanings, she learned to listen to her body and find healing even though a cure was impossible. Never asking "Why me?" she instead asked, "What's next?" and forged a new life paradoxically filled with joy. "Ellen Schecter creates a visual symphony with her extraordinary command of the unique language of the soul...'Fierce Joy' is a powerful story full of hope, redemption, and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit." - The New York Journal of Books "Fierce Joy is one of the best memoirs of the year so far," Linda Wolf, faboverfifty.com/bookblog/2012/04 "[Ellen] Schecter says, 'I not only want to make peace with my illness, I want to sanctify it...to discover or create..a deeper, even sacred meaning for it.' Schecter shows there is solace to be found in that inevitable time when we each must look squarely into the face of our own mortality." tablet mag.com/ diagnosis-is-not-death I didn't just write FIERCE JOY: I lived it, day by day, minute by minute. This book began as notes scribbled in a $1 black-and-white speckled CompositionBook--the kind we all used in elementary school. I bought one the day I firstwent to my first neurologist, and began filling it with questions more than answers.It was as if that were the first day of a new course I was taking: a lesson in what my newlife would be like living with two terrible illnesses.  Facts and questions soon shared space with ideas and feelings--and tears also lefttheir marks. One notebook soon filled and I needed a second, then a third. I was exploring a whole new world, and needed to understand it. And, as a writer, Idid that word by word.  Then, the day I had to sign my final Disability papers and leave my job--a day when I felt my heart was cracking into jagged pieces--I began to realize that my notebooks were filled with the gold I could mine for the book I suddenly realizedI was going to start writing--the book I suddenly announced I would write to a room full of strangers, the words jumping out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. There are now more than five notebooks, all crammed with scraps, receipts, stickdrawings, doctors' appointment cards, prescriptions, get-well cards, and notes of all kinds...and the best of those glints of gold became part of the book you are about to read. Writing this book helped me understand how to go on living: how to change my lifeand reach for joy. Not a pale or saccharine joy, but the robust, hard-won fierce joy that flames up out of harsh moments: the joy that is the honey in the rock. I hope you find your own joy: fierce, or gentle. No flaps. An extraordinary book that opens up the lived experience of illness, by a person gifted with the means of reporting from those dreaded outposts. Fierce Joy unfolds to reveal the emergence of other selves in the wake of illness--selves of body, of family, of faith, of mystery, of love. If you are ill or living with someone who is ill -- or realizing that someday you will be ill, read this book. Rita Charon, MD, PhD Executive Director, Program in Narrative Medicine Columbia University Fierce Joy is deeply moving and brilliantly articulated: the emotionally complex tale of a woman's journey through the land of the sick as she comes to understand the power of healing, even when it isn't attached to cure. It helps us all make more sense of the struggles in our lives. Rabbi Rachel Cowan, Director, Institute for Jewish Spirituality In a sensuous, painterly account of illness and healing, Schecter reproduces, without one false note, the self shattered into parts that are essential to accommodating the experience of illness: there is Scared Ellen, Rational Ellen, Wise-Ass Ellen, Observing Ellen, and finally, Transcendent Ellen. Fierce Joy is a dazzling, humbling teacher, articulating for me - as a rabbi, clinical psychologist and someone with lupus - much that I could never put into words myself. You will be amazed by the posture of her heart. Rabbi Susan Schnur, Psy.D., Senior Editor, Lilith Magazine Ellen Schecter has published many books for children. Her first novel, THE BIG IDEA (Hyperion), won the Américas Book Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature. Her FAMILY HAGGADAH (Viking) was a Book-of-the-Month and Jewish Book Club selection. Schecter has written or collaborated on many multi-award-winning TV series for children and families, including: "Reading Rainbow," hosted by LeVar Burton on PBS