The Giver: Controversial book is now a movie

MANILA, Philippines - Just for a second, imagine a world without war, conflict or grief. Refreshing, right? But it’s also a world without memory, at least in the premise of Lois Lowry’s bestselling novel The Giver.

The Giver swept up nearly every prestigious prize for young adult literature, including the Newbery Medal and the William Allen White Award. Since its release, The Giver has been one of the most controversial books that was published.

Lowry came up with the idea of a scary, sterile world where nearly everyone takes drugs to suppress their memories and emotions after her father was put in a nursing home.

“He didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but he began to lose pieces of his memory, the way people do as they age,” she recalls. One day, she showed her father a photo of her sister, who died at the age of 28.

“And he said, ‘I can’t remember her name,’ and I told him her name,” she says. “And he said, ‘Whatever happened to her?’ And I had to tell him about her death.”

Like so many who’ve suffered the pain of losing someone, Lowry considered — just passingly — how much better our existences might be if we didn’t have memories at all.

“And so I began to think about writing a book about people who had found a way to manipulate human memory, so they wouldn’t have to remember anything bad,” she explains.

Since the late ’90s, The Giver has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and has been adapted into a play, a musical and an opera.

Most schools today now teach it as required reading but there are still some educators who banned it from the campuses.

Lowry says she didn’t think of The Giver as “futuristic or dystopian or science fiction or fantasy” — it was just a story about a kid making sense of a complicated world.

The Giver stars Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, Odeya Rush and Taylor Swift in her first starring role.

It opens nationwide tomorrow.