What Lois Lowry Remembers

Lowry, who has lost a sister and a son, has spent decades writing about the pains of memory. Literature, she says, is “a way that we rehearse life.”
A portrait of Lois Lowry wearing a sweater standing near a shoreline.
Photograph by Jocelyn Lee for The New Yorker

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.

At 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. 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. A voluptuous female nude, drawn in the Expressionist style, beckoned from the middle of the mug. (The students “were too polite even to giggle,” Lowry said.) Once the interview got under way, the author rarely responded straightforwardly to my questions. 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. Lowry no longer does much press, but she seems to view the conversations that she does have as opportunities to transmit as many stories as she can. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

It’s funny conducting a career retrospective with an author whose work thinks so deeply about memory. Are you surprised by what you remember and what you don’t?

I have always prided myself—wrongly, perhaps—on having an excellent memory. I have a secret desire to be called as a witness in a trial, so that the jury can be overwhelmed by the details I recall from the crime scene. Now I’m eighty-four years old; the memory is not as good as it once was. Occasionally, a kid will write to me about a book that I wrote thirty-five years ago, one of the lesser-known ones, and they’ll ask about details. And I can’t remember. And that’s a book that came out of my being. So that’s humiliating.

Do you go back to the book when that happens?

It’s rare for me to reread one of my own books. Quite recently, I was on a Zoom interview with a theatre company that has adapted my books to the stage. And one of them is a book that I’m very fond of [“Gossamer”], but it’s not very well known. They did a beautiful adaptation of it, but were asking me to talk about it. And I did—I bluffed my way through it, and then reread the whole book and blubbered a little bit because it was a sad book. It kind of touched me that I got so caught up in it again.

What was that like? I was just revisiting my thrift-store copy of “Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst,” and was completely riveted.

The [Anastasia Krupnik] series has been republished with new, modern covers. I think there may be nine books about Anastasia, and she gets a little older on the [original] covers—the same child, done by the same illustrator, Diane deGroat. And the new ones are glitzy and sophisticated, but they’re not as appealing to me. Also, the particular book of the series you have, they have changed the title. They did that because they thought, Today’s kids wouldn’t know what an analyst is. I think it doesn’t matter, if kids don’t know what something means. By the time they’ve read the books, they know what an analyst is, and maybe that’s something that’s important for them to learn. But I have no say over this.

Have you thought about what Anastasia would be like if she were growing up today? Would her personality be very different?

Someone recently asked me on Twitter what Anastasia would be doing as a grownup. I think I said she had gotten a master’s degree in, I don’t know, library science.

To return to memory, your memoir, “Looking Back,” isn’t linear or chronological. You weave recollections around prompts—photographs, quotes from your books—which makes the book feel more naturalistic, almost spontaneous. What drew you to that structure?

First of all, my father, though it wasn’t his profession, was a very fine photographer, and we always had a darkroom in our house. I ended up receiving his eight-by-ten photographs of me and my sister as little girls. I have a younger brother, but he was born during World War Two, and my father, a career Army officer, was gone throughout the war. So there are no photographs of Johnny—boo-hoo.

The childhood photographs—looking at those again, in some cases I saw a connection between the child I was and a child whom I later created and wrote about. Those connections are what the [memoir] utilizes, by taking a picture, generally of me, but there are others as well, and relating it to something I’ve written. There are two versions of the memoir, because the publisher, years after the first version, asked me to update it. At that point, my husband had died; I had met Howard, my new spouse, a psychiatrist. The [cover of the] first version has a photograph of me at age five or so. It’s a very pretty photograph. It was one of those days where my hair looked great and I had big blue eyes. But the second version has me frowning and scowling in an ugly bathing suit, and my sister is with me, in her ugly bathing suit. It’s a much more appealing portrait than the pretty one.

It’s interesting to hear about your father being a sort of keeper of family memory. You’ve said that it was a moment of forgetting on his part that inspired you to write “The Giver.”

Yes, my parents both ended their lives in the same nursing facility in Virginia. My mother was in the nursing-care unit—she was blind and on oxygen—and my father was still up, shuffling around, in the assisted-living unit. At the time, I lived in Boston, and I would fly down about once every six weeks. During one visit, I went first to see my mother. She was disabled, but her mind was intact, and she loved to talk about the past. She was a wonderful storyteller. And she talked often about my sister, her first child, who died young.

After my mother got tired, I went across to the other building and visited Dad. My brother and I had created for him an album: photographs of us as children, places we had lived, people we knew. On this particular visit, when I turned to a page with two little girls, my dad said, “Oh, there you are with your sister.” And then he said, sadly, “I can’t remember her name.” I told him her name was Helen, that she was named for her grandmother. And he said, “Whatever happened to her?”

I had to tell him of her death. Which came as a shock to him, because he’d repressed the memory. Driving back to the airport, I began to think, What if there were a pill or a shot that would obliterate parts of our memory and make us feel safer, more comfortable? I didn’t intend a dystopian novel. I’ve never been a lover of such literature, though I majored in English at Brown and had to read “1984” and the rest. I was simply going to write about people, a group of people, who had found a way to live without any sadness or fear.

That was the origin, but there was another thing, too, that maybe my psychiatrist spouse would say I am obsessed by. And that’s dreams. I’ve written several books dealing with dreams, and I think the reason those two concepts, memory and dreams, haunt me is that they are so individual. There’s nobody else in the world who has your memories, and nobody else in the world who has the same dreams as you. I wrote an autobiographical novel called “Autumn Street,” which deals with me and my sister during the war. It’s not a book for young children, but the children are young in the book, and it’s written in the first person, and there is a moment where the two girls are, as we were, living in their grandparents’ home, in twin beds, talking to each other. And the little one—the “I” in the book— notices that her sister has fallen asleep. And she says, “I realized then, for the first time, that her dreams would always be different from mine.” It’s a moment that I suppose everybody has, when they become aware of themselves as individuals.

Do dreams and memories reveal something true, or are they just stories our brains tell us?

I have always described myself, as a child, as being an introvert, which is correct. I was very shy. I still picture myself as someone who was on the outskirts, on the periphery of childhood.

And yet I visited a cousin once, and she had old home movies that she was about to throw away or have transferred to videotape or something. We watched them together, and there was a birthday party at the home of a family friend who had a lot of children. And I would have said I remembered those parties; I would have said I always, you know, stood on the outskirts and watched everybody running round and shrieking and playing. But there I was shrieking and playing with the rest of them! That surprised me, because I don’t remember that child. I remember the observer rather than the participant.

You once said that memory is more “eloquent”—not necessarily more accurate, but more persuasive—than videos or photographs. This gets at another theme I wanted to ask you about, which is lying.

One of the worst things about the community that Jonas grows up in is that it deceives its members. It euphemizes horrors, like murder and suicide, and sanitizes emotions and the past. At the same time, a key theme in “Number the Stars” seems to be that you sometimes need to not know the truth, or at least not know the whole truth, in order to be brave. And lying by omission can be a way of protecting people you love.

In the community of “The Giver,” I’m not sure they specifically lie, but they’ve changed the structure of language. You use the word “euphemize,” and that’s a good one. They don’t say that there is no death, but they refer to it as “release,” so it’s just a different word, which conveys a different feeling. Of course, we do that all the time, and our government does it all the time. But the whole concept of lying, I think, is probably one of the things that makes teachers love that book so much. There are all these open-ended concepts that kids are eager to discuss. I know this because I hear from them every day, the teachers, and from the kids sometimes.

Now, for “Number the Stars,” I haven’t read it recently, but I think [the topic of truth is] kind of a little conversation, late in the book, that’s not pivotal. Of course, teachers might pluck it out and make it pivotal, but I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t see the book as being about that.

Really? I feel that tension so strongly in your work—that both harm and good can come from bending the truth. And you say in your memoir that fiction writing is a kind of lying.

The word “lie” has a bad connotation. But “storytelling,” that’s intriguing, because it really is the same thing.

One can be a euphemism for the other.

What I like to do, although I don’t think I do it consciously, is to permeate a book, a story, a novel with concepts that lend themselves to thought, to discussion. When I was a kid, I loved that kind of book. I didn’t like the moralistic fiction that was most young people’s literature; I gravitated toward adult books that had young protagonists. You might remember “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”? That was one of my favorites. It was published as an adult book, and now you would find it in the young-adult section of a bookstore. Genres have changed. All of the books that I liked and that I write deal with concepts that are kind of amorphous, that you can roam around in and think about, as opposed to “Mary Poppins” or “Peter Rabbit” or the other characters of my childhood.

What do you make of the way that children’s literature has changed since you started writing?

I think it probably has changed, but I’m very bad at reading children’s literature or young-adult literature. I like to read adult books. I like to read about people who are my contemporaries. And I’m also bad at keeping up with “the marketplace.” So I’m not really an expert, but it does seem to me, from what I read about, that there is a lot of hard-hitting young-adult fiction now. When I began writing it, that was not the case. My first book [“A Summer to Die”] dealt with the death of my sister. It was published in 1977, and, at the time, it was said that it was one of the very first books for kids that dealt realistically with the death of a young person. Coincidentally, it was published the same year that Katherine Paterson wrote “Bridge to Terabithia.” So it was ironic that she and I did that at the same time.

But that was rare, and it was probably beginning to herald a change in the field. Now nothing is taboo anymore, and there’s a lot of violence, from what I’ve read about. And I think there’s a larger audience for it. In my day, we went from reading children’s books to adult books. There was no middle ground.

One dominant Y.A. trend, which you arguably kicked off, is the dystopian fantasy.

You’re right, [the “Giver” quartet] did elicit a flood of dystopian books—and I’ve heard, from editors, that they began to wish that the genre had never been invented. Yet they’ve continued to publish it, and people continued to write it. And some of it, I guess, has been very good.

Young-adult fiction has always been a contested space, but for the past few years there’s been controversy after controversy. Conservatives complain that the genre is too mired in ideology—specifically, in social-justice themes or a particular kind of left politics.

I subscribe to Publishers Weekly, so I get to see what’s been contracted, reviews of new books coming out. Suddenly publishers are needing and wanting books dealing with diversity, dealing with racial issues, dealing with transgender issues. All of the stuff that’s in the news is now appearing in literature.

I think the pendulum will come back to a middle ground where those things will be addressed—and, I hope, addressed well—without being in every single book, the way it sometimes seems they are now. But those books are important. Those kids—Black, Hispanic, Asian, trans, gay, whatever—need to see themselves reflected in contemporary literature. For many years, white, intact, often suburban families have been overrepresented in kids’ books. Those are, in fact, the books I’ve written. And I’m newly aware of how lonely it must have been for those who never saw themselves as the protagonists in the stories they read. So certainly it is time. Past time.

Revisiting your own fiction, are there changes you’d make or things you’d do differently? I don’t just mean on an aesthetic level but in terms of understanding more about different people’s sensitivities.

Oh, yeah. In the Anastasia series, there’s a book in which she has a new friend who is Black and the daughter of a Boston policeman. And I hope that the character, whose name is Henrietta Peabody—but she says, “Call me that and you die,” because she goes by the name Henry—I hope she’s not a stereotype. I think if I were to go back and reread almost any of my books, I would find myself cringing. I’m remembering another character in the Anastasia books. She has a friend, a boy who has a crush on her but she doesn’t like him very much. I remember describing the boy’s mother as fat. The book doesn’t really make “fat” into a negative characteristic. But why did I feel I had to mention it?

“The Giver” was often deemed too violent or dark for the classroom. That reception presaged some of the curriculum wars going on now, including the debate over critical race theory and the controversy over teaching writers like Toni Morrison. What has it been like to watch those fights unfold?

“The Giver” was, for a number of years, on the American Library Association list of the most challenged books. It’s considered tame and mild now, except that suddenly there’s been a resurgence [of challenges]. There was this bizarre situation, in Texas, where the schoolteachers were told they couldn’t use particular books unless they also used a book that presented the opposite point of view. And that just mystifies me. These things are happening more and more, and it’s something we need to be aware of and fight against.

Do you find yourself being drawn into these kinds of conversations?

When “The Giver” was published and people were upset by it, I stupidly entered into some of those battles. I later decided that that serves no purpose. I remember when a group wanted Anastasia Krupnik removed from the school. I flew, at my own expense, to Stevens Point, Wisconsin—in the winter, I might add. And I stood onstage in an auditorium and looked out, and all the people on one side were looking at me with hate and disgust, and all the people on the other side were smiling at me. And there were television cameras. It turned out there had been death threats. And I remember standing there and thinking, What on earth am I doing here? Because I wasn’t going to change anybody’s mind.

But what I did do, when asked, was write a letter to a newspaper which was presenting a controversy, so that the kids could read the letters. I love it when kids read letters in the newspaper.

We’ve been talking about adults who want to prevent children from reading supposedly age-inappropriate material. But there’s also some disagreement over whether adult readers should seek out fiction for young people. How do you think about the prospect of grownups reading your—or any young-adult—novels?

Adults should read whatever they feel like reading! I don’t have any feelings about that. I do remember that, when “The Giver” was published, I began getting letters from adults almost immediately. I had always got letters from kids. But there was an airline pilot from Australia, and a Trappist monk, and the head of some corporation. There was a night watchman in an oil refinery. It went on and on. The publishers tend to put an age on books: “This book is for ages eight to twelve” or whatever. They had probably listed “The Giver” as ten and up, so it covered a broad spectrum.

Marketing aside, do you believe that there’s a real distinction between adult literature and children’s literature?

When I sit down to write a book, I don’t really think about who the audience will be. The thing that makes the difference, generally, is the age of the protagonist. The oldest main character I’ve had was probably seventeen or eighteen. So that’s going to be categorized as a book for young adults. As for content, if I’m writing through the eyes of a young person, then I’m writing about concerns that a young person would have. But whether the book is for young people is really a determination on the part of the publisher. I don’t limit my language, for example—although I noticed that one of the reasons Anastasia was in trouble in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, was because the word “shit” was in the book. She was a ten-year-old child, and it was presumably a book for people that age. In the edition with the new, more sophisticated cover, they removed that word.

I once got a complaint from a parent because an adult in “Number the Stars” uses the word “damn.” She said, “We don’t use profanity in our house and I won’t allow a book that contains that.” I have saved, over the years, some of the letters; you can almost see the outrage in the penmanship. The salient phrase from that letter was “Jesus would be ashamed of you.” I try to answer these people graciously, but sometimes it’s hard because they’re so stupid.

Kids are sometimes more thoughtful readers than adults.

Literature, for all of us, is a way that we rehearse life. And, of course, I don’t have that much life left. I’ve already experienced everything that one can experience. But kids who are ten years old, they have it all in front of them, and some of it is going to be very, very hard. When they read about people experiencing those hard things, they rehearse how they would react, feeling it without having to truly feel it yet. It serves a valid purpose for them.

Do you ever imagine that you’ll write about the pandemic?

You know, oddly enough, I did, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Maybe ten, twelve years ago, I wrote a book that was part of a series, published by Scholastic, called “Dear America.” Each of those books takes a world event and tells the story of it through the eyes of a child who is on the periphery. Some of them are quite wonderful, and Scholastic asked whether I’d do one on the San Francisco earthquake. It would have been a lot of fun, but it would have meant leaving my family, my dog, my house. I live in Maine.

So, because I have a house in the country, very near a Shaker village, I asked if I could do something about that instead. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Shakers, but they were a religion that flourished in the eighteen-hundreds. They were celibate, but they increased in numbers, in part, by taking in orphans. And, in order to create an orphan, I set the book [“Like the Willow Tree”] in 1918, during the Spanish flu, an epidemic that decimated the world. Just last year, they republished that book, put on a different cover—and now it’s a young girl wearing a mask. In the book, the flu section is quite small; what I wanted to deal with was the orphan adapting to life in a very religious community. But I did the research to find out what it was like in Portland, Maine, during that epidemic, and there were arguments about whether to wear masks or not. So it all seems very contemporary now.

Are you working on anything new?

I have a book coming out in the fall of 2022. It’s very different from all my other books; I think it’s my fiftieth. But it’s a combination of history and fiction, and it came about because I was reading something about a body that had been found in a peat bog, in northern Germany, in the fifties. There are many such bodies because the chemistry of the bogs has preserved them. This one was dated at two thousand years old, and they decided it was a thirteen-year-old girl. Many of the bodies had wounds or ropes around their necks, as if they’d been executions, but there was no visible reason for the girl’s death. She had long blond hair, and half of it was gone as if it had been shaved.

So I got intrigued by that, and I wrote about the history of northern Germany, two thousand years ago, and the finding of the body. And then I wrote a piece of fiction about who this girl might have been, and why she might have been buried in a bog at the age of thirteen. I described how, at a later point, another anthropologist with access to later scientific methods reëxamined that body, and announced that it was actually a sixteen-year-old boy. He was very unhealthy, probably died of malnutrition. And then I wrote a second story about the boy. It doesn’t have a title yet.

It’s funny. We’ve been talking about how memory can be unreliable, and of course history, the public version of memory, can be equally unreliable.

There’s no way ever to know what the real history was. That’s quite clear in the book: This part is made up. This is what might have happened. I don’t think I did it consciously, but I was aware, always, that I was writing two stories, each with an adolescent character who would, by the end of the story, be dead. So I had to aim the story toward that death.

It could have ended up being terribly grim. But I created stories in which each of them died leaving something of value behind, something that might have changed the future in some way.

Do you mind if I ask you about your son, Grey?

No, no.

It’s just that you were speaking about children whose deaths transformed the people they left behind. I know that you lost your son when his plane crashed, in 1995. Was that something you were thinking about while writing the book?

I hadn’t made that connection until you raised the question. Grey was my second of four children—girl, boy, girl, boy—and he was quite an individual, very determined, very good. When he was twelve years old, he announced that he wanted a horse. We lived on twenty acres of unfenced land, and we told him he would get a horse if he fenced a pasture: he had to cut down the trees and dig the holes and plant the fence posts. He enlisted his friends, like Tom Sawyer, but it wasn’t fun, and they all quit. He did it all himself, and when the fence was done we got him a horse. And he was allergic. Any time he went near the horse, his eyes would swell and tear and he’d start blowing his nose. But he kept going out until, eventually, he acclimated himself. That’s just the kind of kid he was.

Years later, he signed up to take the tests to become an Air Force pilot. There was an I.Q. test, plus a physical exam—you have to be a perfect physical specimen, which he was. He passed the tests, but, right before his physical, he went out skiing and broke his shoulder. The exam couldn’t be rescheduled, and if he didn’t pass it the whole thing was shot. So he took the sling off his arm and went into the physical with the broken shoulder. They made him do certain things, like pushups. He said that he did them all, then excused himself, went into the bathroom, and lay on the floor crying.

Anyway, he became an Air Force officer, and I flew to Texas to pin on his wings. He met his wife when he was stationed in Germany. She was the office manager of the Porsche agency, and he invited her out for dinner after she took him out for a test drive. They had a child, after they’d been very happily married for five years. My only granddaughter. And when that child was less than two years old, Grey was killed. It was because of a mistake made by a mechanic. And, sadly, the mechanic was charged with negligent homicide, and he killed himself on the first day of the trial, leaving two children. So it was a tragedy on top of a tragedy.

But I’ve always saved—and I have it here on my computer; I reread it the other day—a letter that Grey wrote to me. He had been demonstrating an F-15 plane at an air show in England, and there were zillions of people there. He was walking to the V.I.P. tent for a cup of coffee, and a little boy came over to ask him to autograph his program. Grey gave the boy his helmet to hold while he signed, and when he glanced over he noticed that the boy was stroking the helmet as if it were magical. He had a sudden sense of what he represented to the boy. And he said, “I write this to you, Mom, because I know you experience this all the time.”

I’m getting choked up. It was a great loss. When he died, a friend of mine who was a Shakespearean actor sent me a quotation from “Macbeth.” In the play, Macduff gets the news that his wife and children have been killed, and he becomes inconsolable and incoherent. Another character says to him, “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” And I think that’s true. I think it’s something that literature does, that writing does, that speaking about things does. It keeps our hearts from breaking.