What Lois Lowry Remembers

The title character of Lois Lowry’s most famous novel, “The Giver,” is an old man who guards all of human history and memory. The book’s protagonist, Jonas, is his apprentice. 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. When the book came out, in 1993, Lowry had already won a fervent following. 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. But “The Giver” remains her deepest achievement. 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. It also landed on the American Library Association’s list of the most challenged books of the nineties. 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.

Lowry was born in Hawaii, and her family moved frequently, owing to her father’s career in the Army. (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. 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. Lowry now splits her time between Maine and Florida with her partner, a retired psychiatrist.

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