After nearly two decades with Good Morning America, reporter and anchor Joan Lunden quietly
left in 1997, leaving many fans wondering what happened.
In addition to her subsequent hosting jobs and occasional TV appearances, here are some
of the things she's been up to.
Starting in 1980 as the co-host of Good Morning America, Lunden's was the face millions turned
to each morning for the soft news they needed to start their day off right.
In 1997, she left the show.
But why would anyone ever leave such a cushy, well-paying gig?
Lunden announced her exit from the show in May 1997, claiming she wanted to move on in
order to "spend mornings with [her] three daughters."
"For the past seventeen years, she has been one of the most significant figures in womens'
changing role on television and thus in society."
When she actually departed in September 1997, Lunden discussed the many opportunities she
had been offered, including a syndicated talk show, a book deal, and even a move into acting.
She explained to the Los Angeles Times,
"I've been offered several scripts.
I'm going to take some time off to think about what I want to do next."
Even though she left Good Morning America, her workplace since 1976, including her time
as a correspondent, her contract with ABC didn't end until 1999, so plans were made
for Lunden to file stories for 20/20 and PrimeTime Live.
All that nighttime news work never materialized for Lunden, which probably has something to
do with the fact that she really didn't want to leave Good Morning America, and that she
was allegedly forced out by ABC executives.
This never became a well-known scandal of the popular morning show, perhaps because
Lunden never made a huge deal out of it.
The official line was that she wanted to hang out with her kids and try new things, but
Lunden later admitted on The Oprah Winfrey Show's Where Are They Now? that she was actually
asked to leave because, at age 46, she was supposedly too old for Good Morning America.
"The words are, 'We've decided to make a change on the show.'"
"Oh, okay."
" And so they, you know, found a 30-year old version of me."
ABC also ousted Lunden's longtime co-host Charlie Gibson and replaced him with a younger
man, and according to Lunden, the new hosts didn't last long at all.
In 1999, those new hosts were replaced by well-known ABC News personalities Diane Sawyer,
and once again, Charlie Gibson.
Lunden met her first husband at work.
In the '70s, she was a brand new reporter at Good Morning America while Michael Krauss
was a veteran producer for the show.
In 1978, they got married and as she became one of the most well-known people on TV, her
career naturally eclipsed his.
By 1992, they were done.
She told People,
"We've been growing apart for years.
I probably stayed in it much longer than I should have."
Lunden claimed that even going to marriage counseling three times a week didn't help
them.
Four years later, according to People, Lunden happened to meet a man named Jeff Konigsberg
at a deli in Westchester, New York.
She shared,
"He had this great smile.
And I said, 'Why can't I meet a nice man like that?'"
Well, she did meet him, because seconds later, the Maine summer camp owner came up to her
table to introduce himself.
After a little more than three years of dating, Konigsberg proposed in April 2000, and they
got married just 10 days later.
Lunden is ten years older than Konigsberg, and she already had three daughters from her
first marriage by the time they married in 2000.
But she was by no means ready to close the family-building chapter of her life.
Lunden told People,
"Even before I met Jeff, I really wanted to find somebody who wanted to have a family."
But Lunden was into her 50's by the time she'd settled down again, which can limit the possibility
of successful pregnancy.
And so, with the help of a surrogate, Lunden and Konigsberg welcomed twins, Max and Kate,
in June 2003.
Less than two years later, and apparently undaunted by having tiny tots running around
the house, Lunden again sought out the same surrogate, and embryos were implanted.
And again, she delivered a set of twins to Lunden and Konigsberg.
Lunded quipped to People,
"I'm just glad we didn't get triplets!"
Lunden spoke with Larry King about becoming a mother again in her early 50s, telling him,
"It's interesting when you start to have children at this time...You are so much more relaxed,
you don't have the unbelievable demands on you that I had at that time where you're just
being pulled in a million different directions.
So in a way it's kind of interesting how you can, I mean, I'm looking forward to going
through it this time in a very different way."
In June 2014, Lunden returned to her old TV home of Good Morning America to make a very
special, and very serious, announcement.
The former host shocked and concerned her fans when she confirmed that she was in the
midst of a battle with stage 2 triple negative breast cancer, which is an "aggressive" form
of the disease.
"In the beginning it was kind of, you almost feel like, 'What did I do wrong?'"
Lunden's cancer-fighting regimen was also an aggressive one.
She endured a grueling 16 rounds of chemotherapy, as well as a lumpectomy surgery, and then
six weeks of radiation.
Somehow, she found the strength and courage to document it all on her video blog along
the way.
She also famously appeared completely bald on an October 2014 cover of People.
Just nine months after sharing her diagnosis with the world, and dealing with cancer in
a way that others may have found strength or wisdom in it, she confirmed to People in
March 2015 that she had completed her extensive treatment, telling the outlet,
"You go in one person, and you really do come out another.
I've always been a health addict for a long, long time, but frankly I can't think of a
more important assignment."
As of 2018, Lunden is cancer-free, but her fight against the disease is long from over.
While she would've had every right to retreat into private life and surround herself with
family and friends after receiving her cancer diagnosis, that isn't what Lunden did.
She saw her medical crisis as an opportunity to educate women and hopefully inspire them
to take better care of themselves.
Lunden's major post-Good Morning America career has been about being a health advocate, particularly
for breast cancer awareness.
She gets her message across through speaking engagements, articles, internet-video channels,
and television appearances.
After completing her own breast cancer treatments in 2015, she told People magazine,
"I found this breast cancer community to be such an amazing, powerful, compassionate alliance.
I realize that maybe my treatment is over, but this journey is far from over for me.
Being able to say I'm done and I saved my life, it inspires me to keep motivating women
to go to the doctor, get those lifesaving tests, the mammograms, your gynecological
exam every year, your colonoscopy."
Giving a book deal to Lunden, a friendly and well-liked celebrity who was on TV five days
a week in the '80s and '90s, was a no-brainer for a publisher looking to make a lot of money
fast.
In 1996, Putnam published Lunden's first book, a sensitive memoir called Good Morning, I'm
Joan Lunden.
In it, Lunden details her rise to the top level of TV, along with the story of how her
surgeon father died in a plane crash when Lunden was only 14.
Lunden followed that with many more books, several during her tenure on Good Morning
America.
She found the time to knock out Joan Lunden Wake-Up Calls, Chicken Soup for the Soul:
Family Caregivers, Your Newborn Baby, and a number of titles focusing on healthy living
and healthful eating.
Probably Lunden's most notable book, released in 2015, is her honest memoir Had I Known:
A Memoir of Survival, which chronicles her painful, harrowing, and still powerful story
of her fight against breast cancer.
Lunden faced a tough fight against breast cancer in 2014, but all that was countered
with a bit of life-affirming joy.
Around the same time as her diagnosis, Lindsay Krauss Weinberg, Lunden's daughter with first
husband, welcomed a baby girl, officially making Lunden a grandmother.
A little over one year later, Lunden's family grew again when her other daughter from her
first marriage, Jamie Krauss Hess, gave birth to a baby boy.
By that point, Lunden had completed treatment for her breast cancer, was on the road to
recovery, and ready to get down to grandma business.
Lunden spoke about the difference a year makes during a September 2015 interview on the Today
show.
Just a year earlier, when her granddaughter Parker was born, she was in the middle of
chemo and feeling her worst.
"And, you know, I just wanted everything to be wonderful that day, and I didn't want anybody
to know how bad I felt."
But the next year, when her grandson Mason was born, she was back to feeling like her
strong, healthy self.
Opening up to Closer Weekly, Lunden celebrated her ever-expanding family, saying,
"I came out [of my cancer battle] incredibly appreciative of every little nuance of life,
especially new babies.
Holidays, birthdays, events at my house are big, rambunctious and maybe a little chaotic,
but really, really full of joy and fun!
I feel really blessed to be a grandma!"
In addition to raising a total of seven children and working high-profile jobs in television
news, Lunden had even more responsibilities in the '90s and 2000s.
She took care of her older brother, Jeff, who had type 2 diabetes.
"Nobody should have to go through what we watched my brother go through."
Lunden was also taking care of her mother.
She admitted to People in 2020,
"I was in my 30s and I became financially responsible for them."
So she moved them into a house in Los Angeles together while she tried to help however she
could from her home in New York.
She explained,
"I would have a caregiver come in every couple of days, take them to doctor's appointments
and help them around the house."
After Jeff died in 2007, Lunden sought out a live-in facility for her mother, by then
87 and suffering from rapidly progressing dementia.
She told People,
"I got thrown into having to find senior living care and I didn't know anything about it.
Had I educated myself first it could have been much easier."
In trying to help others avoid her struggle, Lunden began giving talks about senior care,
which led her to an assisted living referral company called A Place for Mom.
Lunden became the service's spokesperson, appearing in their TV ads since 2012.
Lunden's first 10 books are a contrasting bunch, but there's one through line that recurs
in all of those titles, and it's the same one that defines Lunden's post-Good Morning
America professional life: They're all about living a healthy and mindful lifestyle.
That thesis is present in her eleventh book, too, the 2020 release Why Did I Come Into
This Room?
It's a book about dealing with the problems and issues that come from aging, but it's
the first one for the TV personality and author in which humor is at the forefront.
Expressing how it feels for someone of the forever-young Baby Boomer generation to inch
toward 70 years old, Lunden, who turned 69 in September 2019, joked,
"I'm too old for Snapchat, but too young for Life Alert."
Why Did I Come Into This Room? is also a departure for Lunden in that it aimed to reveal truths
to the audience but ultimately proved revelatory and therapeutic for the author.
She told Publishers Weekly,
"This book morphed from the time I started writing it five or six years ago.
I was originally talking about staying younger longer.
Then I realized I wanted to know more about accepting aging and understanding how to better
prepare for it."
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