The child in her eyes

Lois Lowry finds common ground with her young readers by drawing on her own life

Lois Lowry (with her dog Alfie) writes children's books, sometimes about tough subjects -- like death -- with no easy answers. (David Ryan/Globe Staff)

CAMBRIDGE - Lois Lowry flies under the radar of most adults. But she's a monumental figure to many readers in the 11-to-15 age range.

"She has huge appeal," said librarian Judy Nelson of Tacoma, Wash., past president of the Young Adult Library Services Association. "Once she has been introduced, it's not unusual for a child to read all her books as she grows up. We have schools that require her books, on the fifth- or sixth-grade level."

Two of Lowry's novels - "Number the Stars" (1989) and "The Giver" (1993) - won the John Newbery Medal, the preeminent award for children's chapter books. The latter has sold 5 million books in 29 languages, and a movie version is in development. Her 2006 novel, "Gossamer," is being adapted for the stage, and last year she won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime contribution to young adult books by the American Library Association.

Last month, Lowry, who recently turned 71, added "The Willoughbys" to her list of 33 books over 31 years. It's a comic riff on children's classics, with a grab-bag of plot chestnuts - the kindly rich benefactor, the no-nonsense nanny, and the long-lost heir. Having read only that book, or such other lighthearted titles as the "Anastasia Krupnik" or "Gooney Bird Greene" series, one would never guess at the trouble and darkness to be found in Lowry's best-known books.

In her first book, 1977's "A Summer to Die," a girl suffers the death of her only sister. "Number the Stars," based on historical fact, tells of the hiding and rescue of Denmark's Jews during the Nazi occupation. "The Giver" concerns a boy who tries to escape from a dystopia with no color, hills, natural sunshine, or books. In "The Silent Boy," set in a farm community in the 1930s, a mute boy is blamed for a baby's death and committed to an asylum.

In an interview in her sunny writing room, with Tibetan terrier Alfie snoozing at her feet, it was clear that Lois Lowry is a watcher and listener, resolved to gaze quietly and directly at human fate. Born in Hawaii just before World War II, she moved frequently as her father, a career army officer, was transferred here and there, including periods in Korea and Japan.

"I was extremely introverted and shy," she said. "I was passionate about literature, and my friends were not. They wanted to play jump-rope, so I took a cursory interest, but I really wanted to be inside reading all the time, and that made me a bit of an outsider."

She went to Brown University but dropped out at age 19 to marry a naval officer. By age 26, she had four children. She and her husband lived for a time in Cambridge and moved to Maine in 1963, where she finished college at the University of Southern Maine. In the 1970s, she worked as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist. Her marriage broke up when she was 40, and she returned to Boston in 1979, living first on Beacon Hill, and since the early 1990s, on a leafy street in Cambridge.

In 1975 she published a story in Redbook magazine which led to a suggestion by a Houghton Mifflin editor that she try a children's book. She had never thought to write for young people.

"In retrospect, that surprises me," she said, "because I had four kids. I read to them, bought them books, took them to the library, and then would go to my room and write for adults. Why did I never think of writing for kids? I took it as an interesting challenge, and that is when I wrote 'A Summer to Die.' "

Lowry's writing is unadorned and straightforward. "I think of her as a writer of ideas," said Roger Sutton, editor of the Horn Book, the Boston-based children's literature review magazine. "She has a clean style - she doesn't go into flights of lyricism, or have a Hemingwayesque clippedness, either. She stays out of the way of her story and her characters."

Her own sorrows have leavened her writing. When she was 25, her beloved big sister died of cancer, a loss that entered "A Summer to Die" in fictionalized form. "Autumn Street," also based on a real childhood incident, tells of the murder of a girl in a small Pennsylvania town during World War II.

In 1995, her son Grey, an Air Force fighter pilot, was killed in an accidental crash in Europe, and one of her daughters is afflicted with multiple sclerosis. While the latter sadnesses have not appeared directly in Lowry's writing, the importance of touching one's hurts and memories is a recurrent theme.

Shortly before she began writing "The Giver," in which a single person is designated by the community to know about, but keep hidden, the varieties of human pain, Lowry was visiting her elderly parents in a nursing home. Her dying mother wanted to talk about events of the past. "On that particular day," Lowry said, "she talked about the death of my sister, her first child. Although it was so sad, it was clear that she wanted to talk about it. It was as if she were giving me her past, knowing that it would disappear when she did."

Her father was losing his memory. "We were looking at old photographs," she said, and there was a picture of me with my sister as little girls. He said, 'Here you are with your sister. I can't remember her name.' I said, 'Her name was Helen,' and he said, 'Whatever happened to her?' I said, 'She died, Dad.' It was very painful for him. Because he had forgotten, it was as if it had never happened. When I left that day, I began thinking about how memory works, what it does for us, and wondered, 'What if we could just forget everything painful that ever happened. Would that make our lives easier, more comfortable?' " That awful tradeoff is at the heart of "The Giver" as well as its companion books, "Gathering Blue" and "Messenger."

Lowry's books do not give young readers easy reassurances. Much writing for the young, she said, "is patronizing and moralistic. Nothing taints literature for children more than that moralistic stance. Parents often write to me and ask, 'What is the message of this book?' I write back and say, 'I don't put messages in my books.' I don't want to teach anything."

But that stance does not sit well with some adults. "The Giver" is No. 14 on the American Library Association's list of most-challenged books of 1990-2000.

For many parents and school officials, said Caroline Ward, children's book librarian in Stamford, Conn., and past president of the Association for Library Service to Children, "any society that is portrayed as different from the norm is scary, and for some, the way you combat it is not to read and talk about it, but to just deny it."

The sense of gathering menace in "The Giver" is indirect, and for much of it, the highly controlled community seems like quite a pleasant place. Another potentially disquieting facet of the story is that there are no comforting or rescuing adults. Sutton said, "A lot of her books are about children finding out that grownups can be wrong. The books are very much on the side of the kid."

Lowry gets tons of e-mail from young people and parents, she said. Sometimes a young reader will write - clearly assigned by a teacher - and say, "Please tell me all the metaphors and similes in this book." Those readers get a polite form letter, she said, but "sometimes I get heartfelt, passionate letters from young people who felt that a book has spoken to them in some way. Almost every day, I sit down and write a lengthy reply to a particular child."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.