Lois Lowry says that she usually begins a book from a place of wondering about something. She started Son by writing about Gabe, the child Jonas takes with him when he leaves the community of The Giver (Gabe also has a cameo in Messenger). But as Gabe wondered about his past, Lowry did, too. "I became interested in who gave birth to him," Lowry said. She set aside his section, which eventually became the last third of the book. In this final book (she insists she's "calling it quits" with this one) in the quartet begun with The Giver, Lowry explores "the indestructible nature of that bond" between mother and son.
In your Newbery acceptance speech for The Giver, you said, "There's a right ending for each of us," and you mentioned some that were supplied by readers in their letters to you. What has drawn you back to Jonas's world again and again?
I didn't think there would be more books when I wrote The Giver. I liked the ambiguity of the ending. As time passed, the letters continued, as they still do to this day. What happened to me personally also is that I become so close to all my characters because I live with them for a number of months. They begin to feel real to me. I continue to think of them after the book is out there. That was reinforced by the huge amount of mail I got asking about The Giver. Each time I'd read such an e-mail, I'd begin to think about Jonas or Gabe and what that place was like.
Tell us about Gathering Blue.
When I started Gathering Blue, I didn't see it as a sequel or a related book, but more as an investigation of a different kind of community. What if, after some catastrophic event, a part of the world had become primitive or savage? That's what I was exploring. Then toward the end, I realized I could connect it to The Giver and perhaps address some of those questions. When I first completed it, I mentioned Jonas at the end, and my editor asked me to take his name out. Now he's mentioned as a blue-eyed boy. Readers of The Giver recognized him.
Jonas, who had been like a mentor to Gabe, doesn't really help him at the most crucial point in Son. Gabe has to figure things out on his own.
In the third book, Messenger, Seer was the mentor to Matty. He had to let go of the boy, too. Maybe that's part of the process in real life. It has become a recurrent theme in these books.
Some people have, over the years, found religious themes in The Giver. Kids write to me and say, "Are you Christian? Is this symbolism of Christ?" And I tell them, "It can be if you want it to be." People have often told me that they give the book as a Bar Mitzvah gift, as a story of the boy acquiring the knowledge to become a man.
Most of us read 1984 in college, but I think The Giver is the first book set in a dystopia and aimed at young people.
I, too, read 1984 and Brave New World in college. I think The Giver was the first dystopian book for young people. Now every other book has that. I think I created a monster. I hope some new fad will emerge.
I haven't read these more contemporary ones, with the exception of The Hunger Games. Hunger Games has suspense and action, which The Giver is lacking. That's why it's more difficult for the filmmakers who have tried to make a film of it.
Your books allow us to step back from the violence and experience it at a remove.
That may in a way define the difference between The Giver and the current crop of dystopian fiction--it explores those questions without presenting the graphic horrific quality of it.
My daughter-in-law is German. My son met her when he was stationed there. At their wedding in Germany, the service was all in German. I didn't understand any of it, except when a woman stood and sang in English, "Where you go, I will go/ your people will be my people." My husband left Cornell to enlist at the end of World War II, and there we were all sitting together at my son's wedding in this small town in Germany. My only granddaughter has grown up in Germany.
My son was killed in the military and he's buried in a cemetery next to his wife's grandparents. Her grandfather fought on the Russian front. It makes it all seem so pointless, the differences between us. I think that's something the book tries to portray as well, the differences among us being so unimportant as it plays out. I guess that's what literature tries to do is alert and explain and warn. Whether it has any value in that way is hard to ascertain. But we keep trying.
In each book, an elder passes on his or her knowledge to a chosen youth, and that makes them hunger for more knowledge. The role of elder is one of "honor" not "power," as the Giver explains to Jonas. This idea of choice is so central to all of your books in the Giver Quartet. Why?
Power is the thing that isn't important in the long run. It's wisdom and compassion. As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I wasn't thinking politically when I was writing these books, but the obsession with power is something that permeates them. I'm thinking back to Gathering Blue now, the Singer who's so revered, yet when we meet him finally, it's clear he's powerless, he's a prisoner, and he's used. It all seems to fit together, one book to the next, and at the same time, to mirror contemporary society in a way that's somewhat depressing.
I hope that the books, each of them individually but certainly as a group can be viewed as optimistic about the future, in view of the fact that young people are always there, and even though each generation blows it in some terrible way, there's another to pick up the pieces and start fresh. There are no answers to that of course. But we who write stories try to put the questions out there--to make it possible to look for answers. --Jennifer M. Brown