David Small

The author recounts in graphic novel format his troubled childhood with a radiologist father who subjected him to repeated x-rays and a withholding and tormented mother, an environment he fled at the age of sixteen in the hopes of becoming an artist.

A Memoir

Stitches

Paula Plaza Ponte 

Grabbed me by throat and made me feel sad all day but I loved it anyway. #embracethesadness

Small, David

David Small, a best-selling and highly regarded children's book illustrator, comes forward with this unflinching graphic memoir. Remarkable and intensely dramatic, Stitches tells the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who awakes one day from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he has been transformed into a virtual mute―a vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot. From horror to hope, Small proceeds to graphically portray an almost unbelievable descent into adolescent hell and the difficult road to physical, emotional, and artistic recovery.

a memoir --

Sarah Sammis

David Small is a children's book illustrator. His memoir, Stitches, is presented as a graphic novel. It covers his traumatic childhood, surgery and recovery.

David introduces his family at the dinner table, explaining their silent way of communicating with each other. For his mother, it was slamming the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen. For his brother, it was beating the drums. For David, it was getting sick.

With showing, rather than telling, Small goes back in time to his infancy, a time when he had respiratory problems. His radiologist father gave young David numerous treatments, as I guess was one of the acceptable treatments of the time.

Later, of course, he had to have an operation for a growth in his neck. That by itself would be traumatic enough, except that he lived in a family who always bickered about money and would rather spent the money they had on new cars, furniture and jewelry. Much of that spending by the father was to placate the increasingly unhappy mother.

David draws his mother perpetually angry. She is always scowling down her hawklike nose. If his mother is difficult, his grandmother is worse. But all of this comes out first through the artwork and the mostly silent, passive aggressiveness of the family dynamics. Small winds up the tension from the very first page and does't let any of it go until nearly the end, making for a compelling, sometimes horrifying, read.

The book ends with an explanation of the events of the author's life and a summary of what happened after what's depicted in the book.

maitha mana

To some extent, I really felt myself relating to almost every aspect in this novel. I grew up in a house were communication was shunned upon, and abuse was the one way ticket to everywhere. 'Silence like a cancer grows'.

D D D 

quick one. it was okay. I went to the comic book store on harvard ave and randomly selected this. I was the only one in the store and the cashier was belching.

Kali Olson

It is suburban American in the 1950s and 60s, back when we didn’t know a whole lot about the effects of smoking or x-rays, so being subjected to both as a child might not seem to be such a big deal for young David Small, especially given the dysfunctional dynamics of his immediate family. His parents are, to put it mildly, distinctly uncommunicative. This becomes something of an issue when, at age fourteen, David wakes in the hospital after a supposedly-routine surgery to discover that a ragged scar of stitches across his throat has left him minus one vocal cord and little better than mute. “Can’t we talk about this?” takes on a whole new meaning when David learns that what he actually had was cancer, and that his parents didn’t think he needed to know about it. Now David is left to cope with these betrayals as his mother spirals downward, his father fades into the distance, and his older brother has no time for him. The adult David Small recounts these childhood traumas with stark, crisp images and, after the surgery, pages of wordless pictures that tell a raw, harrowing story filled with the kind of memories that we’ll all find eerily familiar, regardless of the amount of drama in our own pasts. There is hope here too, and recovery and healing both physical and emotional. Today David Small is best known as the award-winning illustrator of quirky, delightful children’s books like The Gardener, The Underneath, Imogene’s Antlers, and When Dinosaurs Came with Everything. It’s pretty obvious that his own childhood was not nearly as picture perfect, but his journey from voiceless boy to critically-acclaimed artist is haunting, memorable, and un-put-downable.

Jenni Pertuset

Dark, terrible, fascinating, and wonderful. This was another indiespensable selection. I opened it on arrival and drank in the whole thing inside of an hour. David Small is one of my favorite illustrators of children's books, so it was disorienting to see his hand applied to much more disturbing material. This is a powerful, true story told with beautiful economy. It's worth reading, even if it gives you nightmares.

Bryan Maniotakis

Absolutely loved this. The dark watercolour art paired perfectly with the cruel upbringing of the poor author. 

It made me appreciate my childhood just a little bit more.

Lance Willett

Poignant, emotional page-turner coming of age story.

Ethel

Stitches is a Graphic Memoir written and illustrated by David Small. It tells his story from his childhood, when he was sick, until after the operation, when he was a teen. I really enjoy biographical comics. I think knowing it is telling the life of the author really adds to the story. Stitches is mainly for adults or young adults as it talks about some dark theme such as cancer, pregnancy, death, etc. A Graphic Memoir can describe things in a way that could not be written, especially for the time when David loses his voice. Silence is shown through the pages as well as the lack of communication between the different characters. It just strikes the reader more than in a book. The drawings are in black and white, representing the darkness of his childhood or on the contrary, the brightness of a moment. This comic can be quite intense but do not be scared, it is a touching story. You should read it, just for the details in the illustration.

sophie yang 

andi valdes

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Best Book of the Year An Amazon.com Top Ten Best Book of 2009 A Washington Post Book World’s Ten Best Book of the Year A California Literary Review Best Book of 2009 An L.A. Times Top 25 Non-Fiction Book of 2009 An NPR Best Book of the Year, Best Memoir With this stunning graphic memoir, David Small takes readers on an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of his tumultuous childhood in 1950s Detroit, in a coming-of-age tale like no other. 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.

Stitches A Memoir

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