Memoirs of a Happy Warrior

Book excerpt: Memoirs of a Happy Warrior is an autobiographical account of professional mixed martial arts fighter Roxanne Modafferi. The book takes place over the course of two years when Roxanne decided to move from the United States to Japan for her junior year of college. After settling in with her host family and figuring out how become more Japanese, Roxanne immediately continued her martial arts training. From there, she embarked on her professional MMA career and never looked back. Roxanne toppled several tough opponents and eventually pulled off the remarkable feat of capturing the IFC middleweight championship. Memoirs of a Happy Warrior takes you, the reader, on her journey of becoming lost in Tokyo and its surrounding cities, figuring out how to use the country’s public transportation, living in the Mecca of anime and the birthplace of some of the most respected martial arts in the world. It wasn’t always easy for Roxanne, though, as she often found herself struggling to communicate with those around her as well as suffering a nasty injury during one of the most crucial times of her early MMA career. Still, Roxanne persevered and tackled some of the toughest women in Japanese MMA and held her own against them all. Memoirs of a Happy Warrior describes what it was like for someone who never, ever wanted to hurt anybody to be able to find the inner strength to inflict punishment onto her opponent and have her hand raised in victory over and over. Training and fighting is not an easy career to pursue, but Roxanne Modafferi not only embraced the challenges; she conquered them to become a legitimate world champion. Over the years, she would continue to fight and eventually landed a coveted spot on the 18th season of the wildly popular UFC-based reality TV series The Ultimate Fighter.