Possessing the Secret of Joy is the powerful story of Tashi, a tribal African woman who lives much of her adult life in North America. As a young woman, she is led by a misguided loyalty to the customs of her people to voluntarily submit to the tsunga's knife and undergo genital mutilation. Severely traumatized by this experience, she spends the rest of her life battling madness, trying desperately through psychotherapy to regain the ability to recognize her own reality and to feel.

It is only with the help of the most unlikely ally she can imagine that she begins to study the mythological "reasons" invented by her ancient ancestors for what was done to her and to millions of other women and girls over thousands of years. As her understanding grows, so does her capacity to encounter her overwhelming grief. Underneath this grief is her glowing anger. Anger propels her to act. Action brings both feeling—life, the ability to exist with awareness in the moment—and death, of which she finds she has completely lost her fear.

While not a sequel to The Color Purple or The Temple of My Familiar, Possessing the Secret of Joy follows the life of a barely glimpsed character from those books. Combining fact and fiction, communing with the spirits of the living and the dead, Alice Walker in this novel strikes with graceful power at the heart of one of the most controversial issues of our time.