Artist Profile: Lois Lowry on Loss, History, and Children’s Choices

In the spring of 2020, Lois Lowry came across an “amazing” photograph in a magazine. It showed the body of a child that had been preserved in a German bog for almost two thousand years. The archaeologists who discovered the body in 1952 called her “Windeby Girl,” but scientific evidence now identifies the body as an adolescent male. Lowry — two-time winner of the Newbery Medal for 1993 novel “The Giver” and 1989 novel “Number the Stars” — knew that there was a story hiding within the bones.

“I think it’s relatively unusual — certainly for me, it’s unusual — to do what I did in this book. To create a story, and then superimpose my own nonfiction about how I went about this and why I went about it,” Lowry said in an interview with The Crimson.

In her 2023 book “The Windeby Puzzle,” a mix of historical fiction and nonfiction essays, Lowry blends history and archaeology with two first-person narratives — one female and one male — culminating in a genre-defying text informed by first century Roman historian Tacitus’ “Agricola Germania” and Lowry’s own imagination.

“Most writers, myself included, write a story, but then they don’t tell you ‘How I wrote the story,’ or ‘Why I wrote the story.’ But this story was particularly unique, given the age in which it took place, and the difficulty of finding the information,” Lowry said. “And of course, I guess it would — in the mind of a reader — perhaps raise the question of, ‘Why did this author, who we know from these other more contemporary things, why on earth did she do this?’”

Lowry has written over 50 books for children and young adults, from fantasy to historical fiction and science fiction. The theme of children confronted with the ability — or, perhaps, responsibility — to make difficult choices is a common thread running through her works.

“In all my books, with a couple of exceptions — one book has a main character who’s a dog, and one has a male character who’s a mouse, so we’ll set those aside — but all the others have a protagonist who is making some kind of journey to a destination — not physical, although often it is a physical destination — but a journey along which he or she is going to be faced with choices," Lowry said.

The theme of children making important choices in Lowry’s books has not gone unnoticed by academics. Harvard German Professor Maria Tatar has observed that Lowry’s novels feature resilient kids who face their fears and are ready to confront difficult choices.

“They’re not aware of doing this, but kids use books as a kind of rehearsal for real life,” Lowry said.

Lowry once received a letter from a father asking why she had used bad language in a children’s book.

“And your kid, I told him, is 10 years old now, and he has probably not yet experienced tragedy, but he will. And when he sits in your living room, with you on the couch beside him, and reads something that makes him scared or sad — he’s preparing for what he’ll be later on in life, and he has you there with him,” Lowry said.

Writing books — as well as reading them — has been a way for Lowry to process the difficult parts of her own life. One such example was the death of her sister, which Lowry wrote about in her 1977 book ‘A Summer to Die.”

“You tell and retell it to yourself. Not to change it, because it’s not changeable, but to sort it out, to figure out why it happened. Just to make sense of it, even though it’s probably impossible,” Lowry said.

While living in Cambridge, Lowry would come to Tatar’s German class on fairy tales as a guest speaker every year. Although she now lives in Maine, Lowry still receives 20 to 30 emails every day about her books from kids around the world, some of which are clearly school assignments.

“One actually said, ‘Please tell me all the similes and metaphors in ‘The Giver.’ I need this information by Thursday,’” Lowry said.

Lowry pushes back against the idea that her books have a particular moral message she’d like children to absorb.

“I don’t like to think of it that way because very often, and maybe impelled by teachers, kids write and say ‘What message do you mean for this book to have?’ And the thought of a book having a message is a thought that is not appealing to me. I can’t picture kids saying, ‘Hey, you should read this, it has a great message!’ And yet, of course, what a book has to say will be different for different readers, because they’ll all bring their own selves to the book, as I have done, and so the book they read is not even the book I wrote,’” Lowry said.

Over the past 50 years, Lowry has received deeply insightful messages from children. She began as a writer for adults, but her publisher asked her to try to write a book for children in 1977.

“They were so passionate in telling me about their lives and how they related to what they’d read in the book. I began to feel that it was more important to write for them because they’re at an age where their lives are still in progress,” Lowry said. “They’re in flux. They haven’t yet made all the decisions they're going to make, and they can be affected by what I write, compared to adults who might read a book with interest or amusement, but they're no longer changed by it.”

On the day she was interviewed by The Crimson, Lowry received a “long, skinny message down the side of Facebook” from the mother of a nine-year-old boy who had not taken pleasure in reading before, thinking of it as “as something like a root canal.” But while reading particularly impactful scenes from Lowry’s books, that boy would come up to his mother and ask her to feel his heart beating.

“We meet at some wonderful midpoint, but I’ve brought all my beliefs and backgrounds, as have they, and sometimes those are different. I’m not consciously putting messages in. And yet, because I’m a person who, even today, maintains some sense of optimism about the world — which is sometimes difficult — I think there is always an undercurrent that involves personal integrity and things that flow from that. And if that’s a message, so be it,” Lowry said.

—Staff writer Laura B. Martens can be reached at [email protected].