Pearl's Picks for October

Stitches: A Memoir

by David Small

Place hold

To that shortish list of great memoirs using the format of the graphic novel (Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and Craig Thompson's Blankets), we can now add David Small's Stitches: A Memoir. Readers with young children will likely recognize the name David Small as the illustrator of books such as The Gardener and The Library (both in collaboration with his wife, writer Sarah Stewart). But Stitches is a whole new ballgame for Small: it's a wrenching tale of his 1950s childhood, raised by uncaring, unloving, and indeed, seemingly deliberately malicious parents who never had his best interests in mind.

It begins when David was six, and follows him into adulthood, highlighting various events along the way, including an encounter with his mother's mother (she's like a wicked grandmother in a particularly grim Grimm fairy tale), his bout of cancer when he was eleven (terribly mishandled by his parents, despite the fact that his father was a physician), his hospital stay at fourteen, and much more. The pictures are all in shades of gray, which speak beautifully to the lack of color and happiness that marked Small's childhood and adolescence.

For me, the stitches of the title refer not to the physical representations of his surgery, but rather the emotional stitching — the mending, if you will — of all the damage he suffered in his early years, and the choice he made to become as unlike his parents and grandmother as possible. Heartbreaking and hopeful, all at the same time — this is a book that both teens and adults can read and appreciate.