Something I said would tee up a memory, which led to another memory eventually, I’d realize that the question had been elliptically answered, or set aside en route to richer material.
(The students “were too polite even to giggle,” Lowry said.) Once the interview got under way, the author rarely responded straightforwardly to my questions. A voluptuous female nude, drawn in the Expressionist style, beckoned from the middle of the mug. I showed her my broken-in copy of “ Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst” Lowry showed me the coffee mug that she had been using a few weeks ago, while giving a Zoom talk to an eighth-grade classroom in Japan. Lowry now splits her time between Maine and Florida with her partner, a retired psychiatrist.Īt eighty-four, Lowry is a wry and gentle presence on Zoom, where she appeared (silver bob, red lipstick, fuzzy sweater) to speak with me one afternoon this December. Her personal life has been pierced by losses: her older sister, Helen, died of cancer when both women were in their twenties, and a son, Grey, a fighter pilot, was killed in a plane crash, in 1995. (There were chapters in New York City, the woods of Pennsylvania, Tokyo.) She married her college sweetheart, with whom she had four children after they divorced, in 1977-the same year that Lowry published her first novel, at forty-she met Martin Small, with whom she lived for three decades, surrounded by a rotating cast of animals. Lowry was born in Hawaii, and her family moved frequently, owing to her father’s career in the Army. From the vantage of 2021, the novel is a double portent: a dystopian fantasy and an early spark in the tinderbox of the curriculum wars. It also landed on the American Library Association’s list of the most challenged books of the nineties. Heaped with accolades, including another Newbery and a reputation as perhaps the best children’s novel ever written, it has sold more than twelve million copies.
But “The Giver” remains her deepest achievement. She received a Newbery Medal, in 1990, for “ Number the Stars,” a novel about a Danish family resisting Nazi rule her series featuring Anastasia Krupnik, a mischievous pre-teen in owlish glasses, charmed both grumpy older sisters and their parents.
When the book came out, in 1993, Lowry had already won a fervent following. Jonas’s training involves withstanding the prismatic flood of the past-memories of joy and pain, war and suffering-so that his tightly regulated community can thrive in ignorance. The book’s protagonist, Jonas, is his apprentice. The title character of Lois Lowry’s most famous novel, “ The Giver,” is an old man who guards all of human history and memory.
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