mailman, Jack, an affable guy, began to make wry comments about the weight of his bag. I gave him a large tip at Christmas. By the time I found myself in Antarctica that winter of the Newbery – surrounded by icebergs – I had begun to think that my mail, back home, was something of a tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon.
The challenges came a little later. They took me by surprise. Suddenly there began to appear an occasional distraught letter from someone who called me “godless” or “perverted”.
“Jesus would not be pleased with you,” one woman wrote me in what appeared to be a trembling hand.
A website appeared devoted entirely to a denunciation of The Giver and referring to it – or perhaps to me; it wasn’t quite clear – as The Antichrist.
I found my name on the official list of “Most Challenged Authors” again and again.
A town in the Midwest removed the book from its public schools.
A public hearing was held in a California town to deal with “The Giver issue”.
And I suppose I should tell this part, too: one piece of mail was disconcerting enough that I had a conference with the FBI and was advised, for my own safety, not to visit a particular city in the USA in the immediate future.
The Giver began to be translated into other languages, and with its French title, Le Passeur, it was voted the favourite of the children of France and Belgium one year.
I was told that it was the first American children’s book translated into Thai.
It was used in the tenth grade in German public schools. In Germany an entire population of young people must study the seduction of totalitarianism as part of their own country’s tragic history. Many of them start by reading The Giver.
Today, as I write this, four cities/towns in the USA have selected The Giver as their “community read” the book that the entire town is asked to read, and then – picture this, a whole town! Adults and kids! What a wonderful thing! – to discuss.
Schools across the country make it part of their required reading. Christian churches use it as part of their religious curriculum. And at the same time, countless people give it as a Bar Mitzvah gift.
I could not possibly have planned any of this. I sat down in 1993 to write an adventure story and to explore, for my own reasons, the concept of the importance of memory in our lives.
Somehow, unintentionally, I tapped into something that fed a hunger out there.
It is not always a comfortable thing to be the centre of so much attention and controversy. But it makes me think about what it means to be “comfortable” – the very thing that the community of The Giver had achieved at such a great price. It was a community without danger or pain. But it was also a community without music, colour or art. And it was a community without books.
Lois Lowry
Well, once I spent a very quiet hour in the hills on the island of Bali. I was there with my friend Kitty, but she had climbed down a steep slope to see a ruined temple, and I was hot and tired, and decided to wait for her partway down. I saw an old fashioned soft-drink cooler, the kind where you lift a lid and reach in to get a cold drink, on the porch of a small shack on the side of the path, and the woman there, to my gestured question, indicated that yes, I could get a drink and sit down. So I waited there for Kitty.
I gave the woman some money, sipped my drink, and watched children playing on the steep path. Somehow, through sign language, I asked the woman … my hostess, for it was her house where I sat on the porch … if the children were hers. Three, she replied, holding up three fingers and then pointing to the ones she meant. Then, somehow, again with sign language, she asked if I had children, and I too held up three fingers and we smiled at each other.
But I didn’t feel quite right about my answer. I had had four children, actually, and one had died just a few months before this encounter. Saying “I have three” didn’t yet feel comfortable to me (perhaps it never would, never has) and so I tried to explain … tiptoeing through the language barrier, using my hands … that once I had had four. To my amazement, she understood, and then replied, using her hands, that she too had once had four children. I cannot remember exactly how we conducted the resulting conversation. But we did, and we understood each other. She asked what had happened, and I pointed to the sky, describing with my hands the downward plunge, the explosion as it crashed, and that I had lost my son that way. She expressed sorrow, and told me her own tragedy: a child climbing, and falling from a high place in these hills; a head injury; the very difficult journey to the only hospital in Denpasar many miles away, the fact that the child could not be saved.
We sat there in silence for a while. She reached over, then, and touched my hand. We had not exchanged a single word that either of us could understand. But we had exchanged two lives with each other, and had crossed an enormous barrier. It’s a memory I treasure.
What is the strangest dream you have had?
I don’t know if this qualifies as “strange” but it’s interesting, and it’s a dream that I love. Again and again I have dreamed that I’ve bought, or rented, a new house and am moving into it when I discover that there is a door, sometimes a stairway, that I hadn’t known about. It leads to a whole wonderful room that I hadn’t known was there.
I suppose blue. The book of mine called Gathering Blue – which follows The Giver – centres around the colour blue. How it represents serenity and peace, and how difficult it is to find, but how important the search for it is. That reflects me, I think.
What is your favourite children’s book?
That’s a hard question to answer. There are so many wonderful books. I do love the book Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan.
I love the solitude, the sitting at my desk, watching the words appear on my computer screen, hearing how they sound, the work of rearranging them, seeing them fall into the right order, the place where they have meaning and the right cadence.
What is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you? In regard to writing:
“Start on the day that is different” is a piece of advice I have valued.
