The Giver made Guy Lodge's round-up of ten of the best dystopias in fiction, film, art, and television, Joel Cunningham's list of six great young adult book series for fans of The Hunger Games and Lauren Davis's top ten list of science fiction’s most depressing futuristic retirement scenarios.Slate: People have very strong feelings about [The Giver]. For me, it was the gateway book to a life of bookwormishness, but more strikingly, it endowed me with deep skepticism of conformity. Do you hear this often? What effect does this have on you?
Lois Lowry: I do hear it often, and am always deeply touched by the response. I like your phrase “skeptics of conformity.” It was something I felt deeply as a child though I would not have known what to call the feeling. I grew up on military bases because my father was a career army officer, and I was always vaguely at odds with the rigidly ordered lives that they valued and that I was for the most part forced to live. In 1952, when I was 15 and living on Governors Island (NY) which was then First Army Headquarters, I encountered the newly-published The Catcher in the Rye. Of course that book became the iconic anti-establishment novel for my generation. And The Giver has been that for many of today’s kids: the book that confirms their feeling that the governing body, be it president or parents, may be getting it wrong.
Slate: Jeff Bridges has been very committed to The Giver throughout, originally buying the screen rights and intending for his father to be cast in the role of the Giver. Do you know what specifically spoke to him about the book?
Lowry: He describes having first been attracted to...[read on]
Writers Read: Lois Lowry (July 2009).
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--Marshal Zeringue