I’m not an enormous fan of graphic novels. I’ve got no problems with the idea of them, I’m just not very visually oriented. So I hope you’ll know how much I liked Stitches when I say that it may be my favorite book of 2009.
David Small’s memoir of his harrowing childhood is a terrifying tour de force. With spooky black-gray-white illustrations that fall somewhere between Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Edvard Munch’s The Scream, he depicts a world of angry, emotionally stunted, repressed adults enforcing their self-hating moral codes on the children. It’s as if Norman Rockwell’s Midwestern world was taken over by body snatchers, with glowing square-rimmed glasses taking the place of empty alien eye sockets.
What’s most terrifying is that this is Small’s real life story. Small’s radiologist father experimented with the fledgling technology on his own family, particularly on David, who was chronically ill as a boy. The result was a childhood cancer that nobody told David about until he awoke from anesthesia with vocal chords almost destroyed by a careless operation. David’s ordeal reminds me of Harlan Ellison’s title: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Tormented by his vicious and miserly mother, shadowed by the depression and mental illness that seemed genetically inherent to his relations, David had to find a way to overcome his likely future as a boy without a voice. The way in which he mounts his miraculous comeback is certainly not all roses and sunshine, but the tentative, precarious nature of his success makes his story that much more redemptive.
I blew through this book in two short sittings, but it will stay with me for years to come. I highly recommend Stitches.
Check the WRL catalog for Stitches: A Memoir
Read this last night and enjoyed it well enough. I didn’t like it as much as you did, but I appreciated it a whole lot, if that distinction makes sense.
Of all David’s relatives, I thought his grandmother was the cruelest. His immediate family was inadequate and neglectful, but not actively malicious, whereas grandma was wicked on purpose.
[…] nonfiction, the top vote getter so far is Stitches: A Memoir, the graphic memoir by David Small with 22 votes. This is followed byDave Eggers’ tale of […]
[…] Stitches, by David Small, about a child whose radiologist father accidentally– whoopsie!– gives his son cancer […]