Stitches: a Memoir

Stitches: a Memoir
by David Small
Norton, 2009. 329 pages. Biography.

Many know David Small as the Caldecott-winning illustrator of So You Want to be President, and of multiple other children's books, but in this memoir, he illustrates the grimmest of childhoods--his own. Small grew up in Detroit, predictably pictured as a gray wash, but his home and his own interior landscape are equally dark. His mother, who mostly communicated her anger and displeasure with slammed cupboard doors and weeklong silences, had no warmth to offer her sons. His father, a doctor, treated David's sinus problems with X-ray treatments and when a growth appeared on his neck, his parent's ignored it for three years (just a "cebaceous cyst") until he lost one of his vocal cords, his thyroid gland, and was thought to be on the way to losing his life, though no one actually ever told him he had cancer. Small's artistic gifts are richly evident here where what at first seems to be a simple sketch is really a deeply nuanced expression. Powerful and distressing, Stitches makes Small's off-stage redemption seem almost a miracle.

LW