Stitches: A Memoir
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Stitches: A Memoir |
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| Author: | David Small |
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| Publisher: | W.W. Norton & Co. |
At the age of fourteen, David awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover his throat had been slashed and one of his vocal chords removed, leaving him a virtual mute. No one had told him that he had cancer and was expected to die. The resulting silence was in keeping with the atmosphere of secrecy and repressed frustration that pervaded the Small household and revealed itself in the slamming of cupboard doors, the thumping of a punching bag, the beating of a drum.
Believing that they were doing their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. David’s mother held the family emotionally hostage with her furious withdrawals, even as she kept her emotions hidden—including from herself. His father, rarely present, was a radiologist, and although David grew up looking at X-rays and drawing on X-ray paper, it would be years before he discovered the shocking consequences of his father’s faith in science.
A work of great bravery and humanity, Stitches is a gripping and ultimately redemptive story of a man’s struggle to understand the past and reclaim his voice.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009:: Reading Stitches may feel unexpectedly familiar. Not in the details of its story—which is David Small’s harrowing account of growing up under the watchless eyes of parents who gave him cancer (his radiologist father subjected him to unscrupulous x-rays for minor ailments) and let it develop untreated for years—but in delicate glimpses of the author’s child’s-eye view, sketched most often with no words at all. Early memories (and difficult ones, too) often seem less like words than pictures we play back to ourselves. That is what’s recognizable and, somehow, ultimately delightful in the midst of this deeply sad story: it reminds us of our memories, not just what they are, but what they look like. In every drawing, David Small shows us moments both real and imagined—some that are guileless and funny and wonderfully sweet, many others that are dark and fearful—that unveil a very talented artist, stitches and all. —Anne Bartholomew
Barnes and Noble
A stitch in time can save nine, but Caldecott-winning childrens book author David Smalls unloving parents spared him not a one, as Stitches, his graphic memoir of his harrowing childhood, makes clear. Small was a sickly child, and his radiologist father subjected him to repeated X-rays, believing it would cure his sinus problems. When a lump materialized on his neck, his mother complained about the expense and put off surgery for three years. Small emerged from multiple operations at 14 unable to speak, and only learned later that hed had cancer.
Like Alison Bechdels genre-bending Fun Home, Stitches melds ink-washed drawings and incisive captions to tell Smalls devastating story about growing up in a silent, angry household with miserable parents. With its menacing, childs-eye view of Detroit smokestacks, hospital corridors, and scowling, bespectacled adult faces looming up close, Stitches reads like a silent horror movie.
Communication in the Small household was nonverbal: “Mama had her little cough,” he opens, which augured her unexplained rages. His father “thumped a punching bag. That was his language.” His older brother, who grew up to become a percussionist with the Colorado Symphony, beat his drum. And little David, “born anxious and angry,” got sick.
David is saved by a wonderful psychiatrist, depicted as Lewis Carrolls White Rabbit, who helps defang his nightmares—including his parents—and makes him realize that drawings are his language. Small writes, “Art became my home. Not only did it give me back my voice, but art has given me everything I have wanted or needed since.”
Stitches leaves the reader speechless—stunned at its power and perfect pitch. —Heller McAlpin
