Looking Back

Looking Back: A Book of Memories is a photographic memoir by Lois Lowry, the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Giver and Number the Stars. The book pairs family photographs with personal essays to trace the origins of Lowry's life and fiction. As she explains, the book has no plot; it consists of moments, memories, and fragments, organized around the idea that everything that happens causes something else to happen, the way a ball in a kinetic sculpture sets other balls in motion. The book answers the question children often ask, "How do you get ideas?", by revealing the experiences that eventually became stories.

Lowry begins before her own birth, with a 1910 photograph of her mother, Katharine (called Kate), as a four-year-old walking along a country lane in Pennsylvania. Kate's mother was named Helen, and Kate later named her first daughter Helen after her; Lowry was the second daughter. Lowry imagines Kate daydreaming about the daughters she would one day have, establishing a thread of generational continuity running through the book. A 1911 photograph of Kate with two other children leads to a conversation with Lowry's elderly mother, who could recall one child's name but not the name of the Black girl in the picture. Lowry invents a backstory, but her mother corrects her: The girl's mother came to do the family's laundry.

The bond between Lowry and her older sister Helen is a recurring subject. In a 1940 photograph, three-year-old Lois sat in a rocking chair while six-year-old Helen read The Gingerbread Man aloud, playing school. Lowry sat still because she wanted to hear the story and figure out how to read. In photograph after photograph, Helen is touching her younger sister, steadying or restraining her. Lowry would later re-create these sisters in her fiction, the older one poised, the younger one impetuous, under various names, but always acknowledging they are Helen and her.

World War II shattered the family's life. Five weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the sisters posed in Halloween costumes in New York. Then Lowry heard her mother cry out at the radio news, the first time she had seen her mother weep. By 1942, at ages five and eight, the girls attended school wearing dog tags like their father's and ran to subway stations during air raids, with Helen always finding Lois and holding her hand. Their father, a major in the U.S. Army, was sent overseas, and their mother took the children to her parents' home in Pennsylvania.

Lowry describes her grandparents' house on College Street, later fictionalized as the setting of Autumn Street: a hushed place with unexpected stairways, a sleeping porch, and walls of books. When her brother Jon was born there, she announced the news at the corner grocery, where the grocer gave her penny candy, a memory she later draws upon in Anastasia Krupnik. She recalls her cousin Bobby, whose photograph changed from a Boy Scout uniform to a navy uniform; after the war, Bobby lived hospitalized for the rest of his life.

The middle chapters overflow with childhood anecdotes that reveal Lowry's character and the raw material of her fiction. At six, she carried home what she believed was a sleeping mouse, placed it in the oven to warm it up, and forgot about it until her mother discovered something baking. She endured wearing her mother's European souvenir clothing, including Swiss lederhosen (traditional leather shorts) paired with itchy wool socks and a feathered hat. At nine, her father, home on leave and virtually a stranger, bought her a rainbow-colored woolen hunting shirt she had coveted in a store window. She recalls an overwhelming surge of love for him and for the world that contained both him and that shirt.

Two photographs trace the arc of Helen's life. In 1942, the sisters stood in hideous bathing suits. Ten years later, Helen appeared as an 18-year-old beauty headed to Penn State, where she would be nominated for Homecoming Queen. Ten years after that, at 28, Helen died of cancer. Lowry admits she cannot hold these images together without feeling overwhelmed.

At 11, Lowry moved to Tokyo to join her father, who had stayed in Japan after the war. She reflects on turning 12 there and suddenly finding her mother boring and embarrassing, placing her own awkward photograph alongside her mother's at the same age and noting their identical self-consciousness. At 15, back in New York, she made a hair appointment under the name "Cynthia Randolph"; when her mother heard the receptionist call that name, she gave a half-amused look but never mentioned it.

Lowry's educational path was unconventional. She graduated from high school at 17, entered Brown University, but dropped out to marry at 19. She earned her degree at 36, then left graduate school to finish her first book. As a parent, she tried to create the stability she lacked as a child: a farmhouse in Maine with an apple orchard, bookcases, and animals. A photograph of her son Grey at 14 riding his horse by the river is a scene she believes influenced the bond between boy and horse in The Giver.

After her divorce at 40, Lowry decided to become a hermit, until an insurance agent named Martin called and asked her for coffee. During the conversation, Martin quoted a line from the children's book Babar, which intrigued her. She told him she preferred men with beards; he went home and grew one. They stayed together. In 1983, they drove up a dirt road in New Hampshire and discovered a farmhouse matching the one she had imagined while writing A Summer to Die. They bought it.

The book's most painful chapter recounts the death of Grey. His wife, Margret, called from Germany to say his plane had crashed. Lowry flew to Germany for the funeral. During the church service, a large yellow butterfly entered and hovered over the congregation, recalling Grey reading to his daughter Nadine about butterflies and teaching her the German word Schmetterling. They sang "Amazing Grace" and walked to the cemetery, passing a meadow where horses raised their heads, reminding Lowry of Grey riding his horse in Maine as a boy.

Lowry imagines a conversation with her mother about losing a child. Her mother says it felt like a piece of her life ripped away, but she put one foot in front of the other. Because Grey was a pilot, his last words were recorded: When he realized something was wrong, he radioed the other pilot, "You're on your own." Lowry reflects that we all come into the world alone and leave it alone, and between those times we connect through mothers who read to us, teachers, dogs, friends, children, and grandchildren. Looking back together, telling stories, is how we learn to be on our own.

The later chapters trace Lowry's continuing life. Martin died, and she printed a photograph from Iceland on his memorial program because its desolate landscape conveyed what was happening: He was going someplace all alone. Her Danish friend Annelise, who inspired Number the Stars, also died and is buried in Denmark. A grandson born three years after Grey's death was named for his uncle. Lowry settled in a Maine farmhouse dating to 1769. A mouse wandering into her house one morning inspired her to set aside a novel-in-progress and begin Bless This Mouse. She received an honorary degree from Brown at 76, remembering a professor who predicted her writing career but died before she could thank him. Howard, a fellow widower, invited her to dinner; they discovered a shared love of travel and bought tickets to Botswana together.

The book closes with Lowry's reflection on how books have sustained her at every stage: as a shy child in a Tokyo library, as a teenager befriending fictional characters, as a wife, mother, divorcée, and widow. She held children and grandchildren on her lap and introduced them to talking dogs, curious monkeys, and outrageous girls named Pippi and Harriet. Through writing, reading, sharing books, and saying "I remember," she believes we all hold the knowledge of centuries and become Givers.