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. AUTHOR: 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; "The Magic School Bus," starring Lily Tomlin as Ms. Frizzle; and "Allegra's Window" on Nick, Jr. She was executive producer of the award-winning documentary "Voices of Lupus," which was distributed free to every English-speaking Lupus Foundation in the world.