Though all three are broader in scope than my earlier books, they nonetheless speak to the same concern: the vital need of people to be aware of their interdependence, not only with each other, but with the world and its environment. The Giver - and Gathering Blue, and the newest in the trilogy: Messenger - take place against the background of very different cultures and times. Number the Stars, set in a different culture and era, tells the same story: that of the role that we humans play in the lives of our fellow beings. A Summer to Die, my first book, was a highly fictionalized retelling of the early death of my sister, and of the effect of such a loss on a family. Yet it seems that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections. My books have varied in content and style. In Maine I garden, feed birds, entertain friends, and read. For a change of scenery Martin and I spend time in Maine, where we have an old (it was built in 1768!) farmhouse on top of a hill. Today I am back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living and writing in a house dominated by a very shaggy Tibetan Terrier named Bandit. I returned to college at the University of Southern Maine, got my degree, went to graduate school, and finally began to write professionally, the thing I had dreamed of doing since those childhood years when I had endlessly scribbled stories and poems in notebooks.Īfter my marriage ended in 1977, when I was forty, I settled into the life I have lived ever since. Finally Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my husband left the service and entered Harvard Law School (another daughter another son) and then to Maine - by now with four children under the age of five in tow.

I had just turned nineteen - just finished my sophomore year in college - when I married a Naval officer and continued the odyssey that military life requires. High school was back in New York City, but by the time I went to college (Brown University in Rhode Island), my family was living in Washington, D.C. I was born in Hawaii, moved from there to New York, spent the years of World War II in my mother’s hometown: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and from there went to Tokyo when I was eleven. I was a solitary child who lived in the world of books and my own vivid imagination.īecause my father was a career military officer - an Army dentist - I lived all over the world. That left me in-between, and exactly where I wanted most to be: on my own.

Little brother Jon was the only boy and had interests that he shared with Dad together they were always working on electric trains and erector sets and later, when Jon was older, they always seemed to have their heads under the raised hood of a car.

My older sister, Helen, was very much like our mother: gentle, family-oriented, eager to please. 'I’ve always felt that I was fortunate to have been born the middle child of three.

The giver the messenger