Then it looks at him, and he flees, but the creature haunts him. He stumbles into the pathology department where, on an eye-level shelf, he sees a tiny, shriveled human form preserved in a jar, little hands cradling its enormous head. He worked “by identifying one object in the room and then, in my mind’s eye, making the camera pan around the room.” The first image that came back to him in this way is also the scariest scene in the book: six-year-old David wanders through hospital corridors at night, waiting for his father to finish work. “When I started making it a graphic, it started coming back,” he says. He’d been having bad dreams and knew he had to write something, but he couldn’t dredge up the memories. No one told him he had cancer- no one told him anything.Īn acclaimed illustrator of children’s books, Small says his early attempts to write his memoir as prose got him nowhere. He underwent not one but two surgeries and woke up missing half his vocal cords, unable to speak. At age 14, his parents finally took him to get the cyst removed. A doctor friend diagnosed him with a cyst at age 11. When David developed a lump on his neck, no one seemed worried. As a boy, Small had sinus problems his father, a radiologist, treated him with X-rays, state of the art at the time. The book describes Small’s gothic-horror childhood, his weird, remote parents and deranged grandmother and the catastrophe that shaped his young life. Reached at his home in Menden, in the southwest corner of the state, David Small says, “It’s a gray day in Michigan.” Gray seems appropriate for the conversation somehow, discussing Stitches, Small’s grim, deeply affecting graphic memoir, in bright sunshine would feel wrong.

Stitches by david small