Daily Breakdowns 050 - Stitches

Stitches
Written and Drawn by David Small
Published by W.W. Norton. $24.95 USD

Memoir, as far as I'm concerned, sometimes receives easier treatment, critically, because the events within really happened and the author isn't allowed to invent what he needs to make the story work better. This is true as far as it goes, but there are no memoirs that don't edit the subject's life into a narrative, a thread of important events with the boring stuff cut out.

Make no mistake, the events in Stitches are as harrowing and bleak as they come. A young boy grows up in a repressive household with an ineffectual, often absent radiologist father and a mother prone to rage and long silences. His grandmother is insane, his older brother mean as older brothers are, and drawing provides his only escape and brief comfort. Heavy radiation exposure as a child as a means to cure a sinus condition leads to a growth on his neck that goes untreated as his father instead spends the money on a new Cadillac. When David finally has surgery, the growth has become malignant, and costs him one of his vocal cords as well as giving him a long scar down his neck.

No child should ever go through such horrors as David does. How he endures them and turns his bitterness into a career as an award-winning children's author is a miracle, but a miracle left largely unexplained to the reader. How the parents who put their own luxury ahead of his health were convinced to pay for his therapy is also unknown. Small has a vivid imagination and the reader sees examples of it but mostly in images of horror or suspicion. The image of a fetus in a jar, glimpsed while he wanders the forbidden floors of his father's hospital, becomes an implacable tormentor. A fascination with Alice in Wonderland only leads to other children chasing him and questioning his sexuality. The Alice obsession continues into adolescence as he visualizes his psychiatrist as the White Rabbit, hardly a trustworthy character, despite his apparently being instrumental in Small's maturation and recovery.

The cover, taken from an interior image, is instructive in understanding Small's approach. The characters loom over him, their spectacles making them appear soulless, the grandmother possibly ravenous, zombie-like, while the rest of his family are disapproving. The art inside is all washes and thin lines, even the lettering is skinny. When David is old enough to get out of the house on his own and experience some of the city, it's depicted in vague shapes, his time spent all day in cinemas, his most vivid imagery reserved for his nightmares. Even as his rage towards his parents gives him the strength to defy them, he's still a prisoner of their parched minds. That cancer hasn't been removed.

That may be the most disturbing aspect of the book, that despite the facts of Small's life suggesting he has found a way to overcome this adversity and bring joy to children through his work that he was denied in his own childhood, he really hasn't grown that much. We are told briefly that art has brought him everything, with the clear indication that his art has gotten him women, but the rest of the book tells us that the only woman who owns him is his mother. Although it must have been a particular kind of agony, he doesn't pass up a chance to draw one more picture of her pinched, disdainful face glaring at him or spitting out more mean words. He never yields in depicting her as hateful and loveless, with only a token attempt at trying to understand her own torment as a closeted lesbian. His father, at least in the biographical sketches at the end, gets off much easier, despite his callousness and his likely causing David's cancer. His brother remains a cypher.

Maybe it's too much to ask. Maybe it's grotesque and unfeeling to criticize the book on this basis. But by not finding a way to depict the humanity of his parents, to try to understand the series of horrible things they did, or even to mix in some small moments of joy and kindness, the reader is left with the feeling that this is not a story of triumph, not the coming-of-age story it purports to be because Small has not really come of age. He's gotten older, he's become successful and apparently happily married. But too much of him is still the bitter child, now finding a way to get back at his parents with the strongest voice he has.