Nancy Churnin

Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world with no sorrow and all-knowing leaders who tell you the right thing to do?

That's what a 12-year-old boy named Jonas thinks in The Giver –until he finds out the price of perfection. When Jonas is apprenticed to the Giver, the man who carries the memories and emotions for everyone in his community, he realizes his society has bought its placidity at the cost of passion, freedom of thought and protection of the weak and different.

It's been 15 years since Lois Lowry wrote The Giver, and the Newbery Medal-winning book has only become more popular over the years, selling nearly 5 million copies and being translated into 29 languages.

A movie version is in the works. And starting Friday, Dallas Children's Theater is presenting the local premiere of a 2005 stage adaptation.

The book, with its futuristic setting, is a departure from Ms. Lowry's lighthearted Anastasia Krupnik series and her other Newbery Medal winner, the historically based novel Number the Stars, about a Danish family's rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.

But for Ms. Lowry, The Giver began in a very simple place.

"My father was losing his memory," she says on the phone from her home in Cambridge, Mass. "I began to be aware that he had forgotten the death of my older sister. And at first I thought it was nice for him to not remember her death. And then I thought it was frightening."

Fighting for loved ones and holding fast to them – even after their deaths – has long been at the heart of Ms. Lowry's art.

Ms. Lowry's sister died of cancer in her 20s, and the author fictionalized the story in her first book, A Summer to Die (she made the sisters younger and switched her sister's breast cancer to leukemia). Then she lost one of her four children, an Air Force pilot and veteran of the first Gulf War, in a training exercise in 1995.

Without memories, "they would be completely gone," she says.

In The Giver, the members of the community have been "denied the privilege of memory so that they will feel comfortable and happy all the time," she says. "But I don't think we can appreciate happiness if we haven't experienced its opposite. The thought of forgetting my son's death is horrifying to me."

Today, her granddaughter by that son (one of her four grandchildren and five step-grandchildren) is being raised by his widow in Germany, where The Giver is often assigned in schools as a warning of the seductive perils of the totalitarianism that Hitler offered.

Q&A

Here are some questions that local youths in DCT's production of The Giver e-mailed to Ms. Lowry, along with her answers.

14, alternates as Jonas, St. Rita Catholic School

No. But all fictional characters, of course, are built out of all the people the author has ever known, met or observed.

If there were any changes or alternate endings you would make to The Giver, what would they be and why?

No, I like the ambiguity of the ending. I think it is an optimistic ending.

13, alternates as Jonas, home schooled, Lewisville

What do you think about the book being a stage show?

It's always interesting to see my work move into a different genre. I have to separate myself from it in my mind, though, because of course it is different. In a book, the writer (and reader) can be inside the head of the main character. Not so on the stage or screen.

Is it hard to write such a thought-provoking story but keep an interesting story line?

No. What would be hard for me would be to write an interesting story line with NO thought-provoking themes.

10, plays Jonas' sister Lily, the Fulton School, Rockwall

If everything is the same, and we're not given choices, why would people like that?

It would make life much easier. There are societies ... India, for example ... in which marriages are arranged. Parents like that idea; they think their children will therefore have the right mates. Many things in our lives would be much easier if we didn't have to make our own choices.

What is the main message that you hope people will get from seeing or reading The Giver?

That our choices are important, and that our right to make choices is valuable.Did you know?

At 71, Ms. Lowry has written 35 books in 31 years, very few of them alike. Her latest, The Willoughbys (Houghton Mifflin, $16), which came out this month, is a breezy parody of orphan melodramas. If you want to know more or have questions for Lois Lowry, visit her Web site, www.loislowry.com.