BIBLIOGRAPHY
Small, David. 2009. Stitches: A Memoir… New York: W.W. Norton Et Company, Inc. ISBN 9780393068573
SUMMARY
David Small led a dark childhood filled with nightmares, real and imagined. He comes from an unhappy nuclear family. His father was a radiologist, who believed that his work would revolutionize the medical field. His mother was a housewife and closet lesbian, and his older brother was a drummer. David was a sickly child, born too early with birth defects. His father ran many x-rays on him and administered many treatments. The multiple x-rays given to him without lead protection resulted in David growing a malignant tumor in his neck during his teenage years. The tumor was surgically removed along with one of his vocal cords, stealing David’s physical voice from him. David was angry and bitter and resentful of his parents, his brother; his entire life situation. He withdrew from his friends, skipped school, and became insubordinate to his parents. His mother took him to a counselor, and through counseling, David began to untangle his emotions and learn a new way to speak. He escaped through his artwork and chose to pursue it professionally. He moved out of his parents’ house at 16, and lived in a small apartment where he continued practicing art. His mother passed away, his father remarried, happily, and David became a successful artist who could put his past behind him, unless he wanted to tell a good graphic story as he has done with Stitches.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Stitches is an autobiographical graphic novel that follows the youth and young adulthood of the author David Small. The artwork is dark and sketchy, and most of the human characters seem to wear perpetual scowls or sneers to convey the cold, unloving nature of David’s childhood. Every panel displays darkly shaded backgrounds which enhance the gloomy and sometimes frightening emotions the author must have felt when experiencing these events and passes them on to the reader.
Small breaks the graphic tale into sections based on his age when a memorable event occurred or the place in which the event happened. The story begins when the author is six; he sets the tone by showing himself alone in a shadowed room, doodling on the floor. Readers can feel the small boy’s solitude; more panels reveal the rest of the shadowy house and David’s mother is introduced. Her face is skeletal though her body sags and she wears glasses that are often opaque, hiding her eyes. She slams cupboards, her hands curved as if she is slapping a person with a hard expression on her face. At once, readers know that David’s mother is unfriendly, an attitude which probably extends to her children. David’s brother is introduced as a musician, banging on a drum, his expression angry. He has one arm bent back over his head, holding a drum stick as if about to smash something, not play an instrument. This image shows the reader that David’s older brother is not a source of comfort to David, and instead of being frightened of their living situation, perhaps he is angry about it. The next scenes portray a sickly David, lying in bed, perspiring. His mother enters and places the back of her hand to his forehead, a seemingly motherly gesture, but her following actions are rough. She seems to shovel medicine into David’s mouth while he is barely conscious, picks up the child’s teddy bear, letting it dangle by one arm as if it is disgusting and drops it on top of the child. She seems to being going through the motions of being what an audience would expect from a mother, but without feeling.
David’s father wears opaque glasses, like David’s mother, and regards David as a specimen, smoking cigarettes while lounging in the shadowed panels with his arm crossed. He provides treatments for David’s various illnesses, but the illustrations shown often look like torture scenes, with David being held down and given shots and enemas and x-rays. Readers learn that David’s father believes that the field of radiology is going to revolutionize medicine in the following scenes. His father stands amongst a group of men in white lab coats with a fist over his heart and an insignia for “With Radiology” is in the background. The men look like Nazis, and are described as being “soldiers of science.” Any readers familiar with the Holocaust and/or the unethical medical experiments performed in Germany may feel a chill.
While visiting his father at work, David roams the halls of the hospital and finds a jar with a human fetus inside. His imagination runs wild, and he imagines the fetus as a shriveled old man escaping his jar. David has dreams of the fetus for the duration of the work. David has a vivid imagination. At six, he plays dress up, pretending that he is Alice from “Alice in Wonderland”. He wanders the neighborhood and is often picked on for this behavior and called names like “queer” and “sissy”. The author chooses not to soften any language used against him, which further sets the tone of his dark childhood. David escapes the world through his art work, and the story told often ventures in magical realism as David’s fantasies invade the real world in which he lives. In one scene, David literally falls into the pages of his art.
David is taken to visit his maternal grandparents, whose back story is given in a brief flashback. His mother was an accidental child, conceived before her parents were married. His grandmother is a bitter, scowling old woman, where David’s grandfather seems kind and often smiles in David’s presence. The grandfather is the first positive figure, aside from David, seen in this work. In one scene, the grandfather hoists David onto his shoulders and a light seems to surround them, protecting them from the shadows that span the rest of the panel. David’s grandmother lurks in the background, watching the positive interactions between David and his grandfather. She later has David assist her around the house while his mother is gone. She is cruel to him, withholding food and washing his hands in scalding water. When David’s mother returns, instead of offering David comfort and reassurance, she shakes him roughly and tells him to keep his mouth shut. However, there is a brief hint of anxiety in her features that tells the readers that the mother does indeed believe her son; perhaps this treatment was dealt to her when she was a child as well.
In David’s later years, panels reveal his mother throwing parties, where her eyes can be seen through her glasses and she smiles, looking like an entirely different character. She lights up in the presence of a beautiful woman on whom David has a crush. The woman’s husband is a doctor, and when she gazes at David’s neck, she immediately notices the growth. When she points it out to David’s mother, his mother’s face changes from happiness to the cold, hard expression she usually wears when alone with David. David’s tumor grows over the years as his parents ignore it, in favor of other things, like buying a new car and house and throwing extravagant parties.
David imagines the bulge in his neck growing, containing the shriveled fetus. When he is fourteen he finally undergoes surgery to have the tumor, then thought benign, removed. As it turns out, the tumor is malignant and it is removed along with one of David’s vocal chords; he physically loses his voice, though readers may question if he had ever really had one to begin with. No one seemed to ever listen or care for David. David always envisions himself falling into dark holes, much like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. Many allusions to “Alice in Wonderland” are made.
As David struggles to accept his new situation and acts out, angry and sullen, the readers can see David’s expressions, once innocent, now mimicking the angry, hard expressions of his parents and brother. He ostracizes himself from others, at home and at school. He views himself as invisible because he is without a voice. In one panel, his drawn image begins to face until he is merely an outline mixed into a scene of other people. He dreams of finding large keys and crawling through tunnels that shrink and grow larger as he moves, much like Alice when she first tumbles into Wonderland.
When David is taken to counseling, he sees his therapist as the white rabbit Alice followed into Wonderland, and through the therapist, David finds salvation as he deals with his inner turmoil and feelings of neglect. Revelations about his family are brought into the light: his father might have given him cancer from the x-rays given to David when he was younger, his mother is a lesbian, and his grandmother tried to burn his grandfather alive and is taken to a mental institution. David moves out of his parents’ house and into his own apartment in the city. He paints and sketches out his emotions and slowly regains his physical voice, which reflects David’s new personal strength. When he learns his mother is ill and dying, he is able to visit her in the hospital and hold her hand. He imagines seeing the fetus again, and it is no longer resembles a shriveled old man, but a healthy, sleeping baby. He drives home, and though the backdrops of the panels are dark, they no longer seem foreboding. David realizes that in getting away from his family, he had saved himself from eventually turning out to be just like them, bitter, unhappy, mentally unstable and cruel. The longer he remained in his parents’ house, the more his drawn character began to reflect their shadowed, hard expressions, but when he left his face changed, his eyes open and clear, the angles of his face less shaded.
In his work, Small brilliantly depicts a cold, and often unforgiving childhood with a light of redemption and hope at the end. He parallels his tale to the story of “Alice in Wonderland.” Where Alice went on a magical journey that helped her mature and grow into a nicely turned out young lady, David went on a real journey made magical by his imagination where he battled his own personal Jabberwocky, his family. He followed his own white rabbit, his therapist, and found his way, maturing into a nicely turned out young man. David’s tumor in the story seemed to be a physical manifestation of his inner turmoil, the loss of his voice a manifestation of his powerlessness. David’s struggle to find and save himself from becoming his worse fear, his family, is wonderfully depicted in this sometimes gruesome but well-told work of graphic literature.
REVIEW EXCERPT(S)
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, Amazon Best of the Month
“The boy sits on the floor, on a sheet of drawing paper almost as large as he is. Crayons lie scattered nearby. He leans forward, resting the top of his head on the paper. Then he begins to literally sink through the floor, to disappear into the paper. A last kick of his legs reveals that he wasn't sinking so much as joyously diving head-first into the world he created, leaving behind the world he was born into. Now that I have read David Small's brilliant and heartbreaking graphic novel "Stitches," I look back on this magical paper frontispiece as one of the more moving self-portraits I have ever seen.”—Michael Sims, The Washington Post
“Anyone yet to be convinced by the grand claims made for graphic novels by people like me should look at David Small's Stitches, a memoir which, when it came out in the US last year, was shortlisted for a National Book Award. Now out from the same publisher in the UK, it is a wonderful thing. A moving story about the way man hands on misery to man, it also captures, seemingly effortlessly, the repression and double standards of the 1950s. It is subtle; its characters are beautifully worked; it makes deft use of metaphor and simile. And yet it can be read in just a little over an hour. If this isn't the definition of a satisfying literary experience, I don't know what is.”—Rachel Cooke, The Observer
In this profound and moving memoir, Small, an award-winning children's book illustrator, uses his drawings to depict the consciousness of a young boy. The story starts when the narrator is six years old and follows him into adulthood, with most of the story spent during his early adolescence. The youngest member of a silent and unhappy family, David is subjected to repeated x-rays to monitor sinus problems. When he develops cancer as a result of this procedure, he is operated on without being told what is wrong with him. The operation results in the loss of his voice, cutting him off even further from the world around him. Small's black and white pen and ink drawings are endlessly perceptive as they portray the layering of dream and imagination onto the real-life experiences of the young boy. Small's intuitive morphing of images, as with the terrible postsurgery scar on the main character's throat that becomes a dark staircase climbed by his mother, provide deep emotional echoes. Some understanding is gained as family secrets are unearthed, but for the most part David fends for himself in a family that is uncommunicative to a truly ghastly degree. Small tells his story with haunting subtlety and power.—Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Grade 10 Up–Small is best known for his picture-book illustration. Here he tells the decidedly grim but far from unique story of his own childhood. Many teens will identify with the rigors of growing up in a household of angry silences, selfish parents, feelings of personal weakness, and secret lives. Small shows himself to be an excellent storyteller here, developing the cast of characters as they appeared to him during this period of his life, while ending with the reminder that his parents and brother probably had very different takes on these same events. The title derives from throat surgery Small underwent at 14, which left him, for several years, literally voiceless. Both the visual and rhetorical metaphors throughout will have high appeal to teen sensibilities. The shaded artwork, composed mostly of ink washes, is both evocative and beautifully detailed. A fine example of the growing genre of graphic-novel memoirs.–Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia, SLJ
The graphic novel has been absorbed into the mainstream of literature and pop culture, and now Small's memoir finds good company among Daniel Clowes's Ghost World, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Craig Thompson's Blankets, to name a few. Drawing on what can only be described as a chaotic and, in hindsight, horribly abusive childhood, the artist uses that great pain and occasional Alice in Wonderland whimsy to transcend memory. By turns appalling, intense, moving, and inventive, Stitches speaks volumes through pictures and words. The only complaint? The portrayal of Small's mother as "an unmitigated rhymes-with-witch" (Cleveland Plain Dealer). But overall, Stitches is a must-read for anyone who loves a gripping story well told.—Bookmarks Magazine
A breathtaking, horrific, and ultimately redemptive work.—Miami Herald
--#1 New York Times bestseller
--National Book Award finalist
--Winner of the ALA's Alex Award
--Washington Post Top Ten Books of the Year
--Los Angeles Times Favorite Book
--ALA Great Graphic Novels
--Booklist Editors Choice Award
--Huffington Post Great Books of 2009
--Kirkus Reviews Best of 2009
--Village Voice Best Graphic Novel
--Finalist for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (Best Writer/Artist: Nonfiction; Best Reality-Based Work). Illustrated throughout
CONNECTIONS
Young audiences interested in reading other autobiographical graphic novels, or graphic novels that feature darker themes and dysfunctional families, they may want to look into the following titles:
Thompson, Craig. 2003. Blankets. Marietta, Georgia: Top Shelf Productions. IBSN 978-1891830433
Bechdel, Alison. 2007. Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic. New York: Mariner Books. ISBN 978-0618871711
B., David. 2006. Epileptic. New York: Pantheon. ISBN 978-0375714689
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