Other titles
Autobiography: Looking Back (1998); revised and expanded 2016
A Summer to Die (1977): This debut novel was obviously a very personal and intimate project for Lowry. It was her first published novel, and was inspired by the death from cancer of her elder sister at the age of 28. The story is similar: the protagonist, Meg, is the younger sister of Molly, who dies of leukaemia. The book is about families, grief, and how to find love and comfort in loss and suffering.
Number the Stars (1989): Next to The Giver, this is probably Lowry’s most famous and acclaimed book. Told from the perspective of a teenage girl, it is an historical YA novel about the escape of a Jewish family from Copenhagen, Denmark, during the Nazi occupation in World War 2. It was the first of Lowry’s books to win the prestigious Newbery Medal (the other being The Giver). The title is a reference to Psalm 147 in the Bible[8]. It remains one of the bestselling children’s books of all time[9]. It was widely praised by critics and has been adapted for the stage several times. A film production is also planned.
| 3. | Analyses and Interpretations |
| 3.1 | Origins and Sources |
ZUSAMMENFASSUNG
Lowry’s inspirations and sources for The Giver were her own memories and her thoughts about how memory works. The other major themes of conflict and individualism are also drawn from her own experience and thoughts about life. In her 1994 Newbery Medal acceptance speech, Lowry gave an unusually detailed and thoughtful account of the accumulated inspirations and origins of the book.
In her acceptance speech when she was awarded the Newbery Medal[10] for the second time in 1994, Lois Lowry spoke in detail about things from her own life which had influenced The Giver. She uses a river as a metaphor for a life, for the accumulation of memories and influences, and for the idea of the past and the passage of time itself. She quotes from The Giver, a scene where Jonas looks at a river and “the history it contained … there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going”[11]. She then uses this idea of “Jonas looking into the river and realizing that it carries with it everything that has come from an Elsewhere” as an expression of “the origins of this book”. Staying with the river metaphor, Lowry says that the individual memories she is about to discuss are like tributaries (small streams which flow into a river to increase it in size) which have contributed not only to the river of her life, but to the river which was the creative process which became/gave birth to The Giver.
It is relatively unusual for a writer to talk so openly and in such detail about the specific events, feelings and situations which contributed to creating something. This is not just because of shyness or a desire for privacy or wanting to cultivate an aura of mystery: it is probably very often also just because a lot of writers aren’t able to precisely identify where and how their ideas developed and grew, and what the original seeds of an idea actually were. Lowry’s Newbery Medal acceptance speech is therefore an interesting and rare example of a writer talking very openly and in great detail about the specific details of how an idea grew over the years to become a novel.
Pay attention to the repeated mantra of “comfortable, familiar, safe” throughout the speech: this is something Lois Lowry has identified as a common thread throughout all these memories, and which is one key to The Giver.
These are the memories and inspirations Lois Lory talks about in her 1994 acceptance speech:
When she was 11 years old in 1948, Lois moved with her family to Tokyo in Japan. They lived in an entirely American environment. Later as an adult she asked her mother why they hadn’t tried to interact more with Japanese people and learn more about the culture and the country, and her mother is surprised. “She said that we lived where we did because it was comfortable. It was familiar. It was safe.” Driven by curiosity, 11-year old Lois rode her bike out of the American area into another part of Tokyo, where she was overwhelmed by the sensory input from what was an entirely new and alien world for her, with all the different smells, sights, colours, sounds and different impressions of a foreign culture. As a girl, Lois would often leave the American area to walk around and soak up the culture and the different environment. Though she rarely has contact with people during her short trips through Tokyo, until one time a woman touches her hair and says something which Lois as a child misunderstands to mean “I don’t like you”, but which she later realises was actually a compliment on her hair, saying “it’s pretty”. Lowry says that this moment of miscommunication was an extremely important memory for her. She says: “Perhaps this is where the river starts”, meaning that in her use of the river as a metaphor for her life and the origins of The Giver, this could be the oldest memory which eventually led to the book being written.
In the mid-1950s Lois is at college. She remembers how she and the other girls in the dorm (shared student accommodation) were all basically alike – they dressed and behaved the same, they had the same habits and routines and style. One girl was different, however, “somehow alien, and that makes us uncomfortable”. Lois and her friends are unsure how to deal with someone who is different, so “we react with a kind of mindless cruelty … we ignore her. We pretend that she doesn’t exist. … Somehow, by shutting her out, we make ourselves feel comfortable, familiar, safe.” She describes this memory, which returns to her again and again over the years and which is “profoundly remorseful”, as being another tributary entering the growing river.
The face of the painter on the cover of the US anniversary edition.
© Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
In 1979 Lois is working as a journalist and is sent to write an article about a painter who lives on a remote island off the coast of Maine. In talking to the painter she learns that his capacity for seeing colour is much greater than her own. She takes a photograph of him which she keeps above her desk. Years later she learns that he has gone blind. She wishes at times “that he could have somehow magically given me the capacity to see the way he did”. This is evidently a key moment in the development of the idea which became The Giver.
In 1989 she goes to Germany because one of her sons is getting married there. The ceremony is in German, which she doesn’t understand, but one section is in English, and she reflects on how “we are all each other’s people now”. The sense of community and oneness, Sameness, even, is present here in this memory: “Can you feel that this memory, too, is a stream that is now entering the river?”
Later, her father is in his late 80s and in a nursing home. He is surrounded by photographs of his family, and at one point he points to Lois’ older sister Helen, who had died very young of cancer, and says that he can’t remember what happened to her. “We can forget pain, I think. And it is comfortable to do so. But I also wonder briefly: is it safe to do that, to forget? That uncertainty pours itself into the river of thoughts which will become the book.”
In 1991 she is giving a talk about her book Number the Stars (about the Holocaust) and a woman in the audience asks her “Why do we have to tell this Holocaust thing over and over? Is it really necessary?” She replies to the woman by quoting her German daughter-in-law, who says: “No one knows better than we Germans that we must tell this again and again.” But later, Lowry says, she played Devil’s advocate by asking herself; wouldn’t it actually be “a more comfortable world”