People who survive a traumatic childhood often describe themselves as feeling “voiceless,” but in Stitches, David Small's powerful memoir of childhood and adolescence, the loss of voice is not only metaphorical, but literal as well. The damage to a boy's vocal chords after a botched cancer operation at the age of 14 becomes a central metaphor for a family's emotional repression. The silence David endures through childhood, and eventually overcomes through art, is captured perfectly by the graphic novel form, in which Small brilliantly illuminates the visceral experience of a life outside of words.
The setting of Stitches is 1950s Detroit, in a neighbourhood of row-on-row suburban conformity, where pain is politely kept indoors. A picture window here, a chaise longue there, everything in the Small household is as photo-ready as a Levittown model home.
Stitches, by David Small, McClelland & Stewart, 314 pages. $29.99
Yet behind the sparkle of the double-car garage, the Smalls are miserable and emotionally mute. Instead of talking, they sizzle angrily in silence. David's radiologist father pounds a punching bag after work. His mother, a closeted lesbian, sobs behind closed doors and prepares “burned little meals” for the family, while an older brother channels rage on his kettle drum. Small's monochromatic colour scheme hangs a shadow in every room, dripping scenes with 1950s film-noir gloom.
Small represents his childish self as both a casualty of and reluctant actor in the silence that strangles his family. By the age of 6, he learns to fake being sick because it's the only way he can get his mother to touch him. Keeping watch over his mother's shifting moods turns him into a silent sentinel: A fork moved one inch at the dinner table means trouble is coming; “Mama's little cough” means she will soon disappear behind a tidal wave of depression. As adult readers, we know that David can't do anything to help his mother, and his guileless love and attentiveness make it impossible not to fall in love with, and want to rescue, him.
The section that follows David's cancer operation is the most haunting and poignant of the memoir
An award-winning author and illustrator of children's books, Small displays a deeply felt understanding of how children are wounded by the personal battles their parents wage. Even more, he is gifted at showing how children use imagination to staunch these wounds, often with luminous creativity.
David, for his part, discovers drawing and play-acting as tunnels out of the silence of his family home. He ties a yellow towel around his head – “I had fallen in love with Alice [in Wonderland]. Especially her long blonde hair” – and runs screaming through the neighbourhood. He “ice-skates” around the slippery floor of the hospital where his father works, imagining that fetuses are chasing him. And as a young artist, he struggles on his belly with crayons and craft paper to find the artistic voice that will eventually be his salvation.
The turn in the memoir happens when two of David's vocal cords are accidentally severed in surgery to remove a cancerous growth from his neck – another truth about which David's parents have remained silent. When David awakes, his neck is a “crusted black track of stitches slashed and laced like a boot” and his voice is a hoarse whisper. In a tragic kink of irony, he is robbed of the voice he never had a chance to use just as sweet teenage opportunities might have opened up to him: love, rock and roll and giddy self-expression.
In the wake of this trauma, Small uses his pen like a camera, hauntingly capturing the emotional timbres of David's alienation and reckoning through evocative close-ups, wide-shot landscapes and dreamy fade-ins and -outs. Big wordless panels take us through David's silent world, his lonely house, his social isolation. Betrayed yet again by his parents and regarded as a mute weirdo at school, Small vividly captures the bone-tingling insecurity of adolescence on the margins: “Back at school, at first I was wildly self-conscious. … I soon learned … when you have no voice, you don't exist. Even among my old friends I felt invisible, a shadow flickering around the edges of every event.”
The section that follows David's cancer operation is the most haunting and poignant of the memoir. Like Alice, his childhood heroine, he descends into a rabbit hole in search of identity, which takes him into the inner city of Detroit. Cocooned in afternoon matinees with other lost souls, he dreams of turning himself into an artist, and it is here that Small's artistic virtuosity soars. His huge panels of David slouched in an oversized pea coat against the backdrop of moody streetlamps capture the monotony and disaffection of city life. The glimmers of light on the horizon also suggest the promise of new beginnings in strange and unfathomable places.
For those who appreciate unique stories of survival and second chances, Stitches is a beautiful memoir of a lost childhood, and a voice bitter sweetly found. It will leave you shaken and deeply satisfied.
Lauren Kirshner's debut novel, Where We Have to Go, was published in June.
