Stitches : A Memoir

As reviewed by Toni Whitmont in the November Booktopia Buzz. Click here to see all of Booktopia's Newsletters.

"I was completely unprepared for the emotional pull of David Small's graphic memoir, Stitches. David Small started his illustration career on The New Yorker, Esquire and Playboy. He is best known as a children's book author and illustrator and has won the Caldecott Medal more than once. Small started drawing when he was two years old, and spent much of his childhood, which was plagued by illness, disappearing into his own world of illustration and imagination.
Stitches starts in Detroit in the early 50s with Small the passive observer of an increasingly dysfunctional family. What follows is a descent into illness and a kind of madness, as his trust in all who should have protected him is increasingly betrayed.
This is definitely Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors territory. Yes, it is a shocking story of parental abuse, and yes, there is redemption at the end. But I was absolutely drawn in from the very first page of this stunning memoir, and I can't imagine how a book that purely relied on words could do it justice. From the scarlet imprint of lipstick on Mrs Dillon's filter-tipped cigarettes to the vulnerability of David upside down on the monkey bars wearing his favourite Alice in Wonderland head scarf, this is a haunting, visual memoir whose visceral impact goes much further than words. I can't recommend this highly enough."

Book description

The prize-winning children's author depicts a childhood from hell in this searing yet redemptive graphic memoir.

One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had throat cancer and was expected to die. Small, a prize-winning children's author, re-creates a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka.

Readers will be riveted by his journey from speechless victim, subjected to X-rays by his radiologist father and scolded by his withholding and tormented mother, to his decision to flee his home at sixteen with nothing more than dreams of becoming an artist. Recalling Running with Scissors with its ability to evoke the trauma of a childhood lost, Stitches will transform adolescent and adult readers alike with its deeply liberating vision.