“Go online and read the front page and then call me back.” Small did, and immediately saw a story about Margaret Seltzer, whose sister had just denounced her gangland memoir as a fabrication. “Have you seen the New York Times today?” he asked. And then he and I spoke at the same time and said, oh well, that wouldn’t have been anything new!”Ībout a year ago, he says, his editor called him in a panic. My editor asked me, ‘What would your mother have thought about this book?’ And I said, well, she probably would never have spoken to me again. “My mother and father are dead, so I don’t know what they would’ve thought,” he says. One thing he didn’t have to worry about was how his parents might react. “I think I identified with him somehow,” Small says, “that angry little face.”ĭespite the difficulty of the material, he says, the memoir process was rewarding: “I feel like a new man, like a cinderblock’s been lifted off my neck.” 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.

David small book