David Small puts his life into his work in Stitches.
With titles to his credit that include Once Upon a Banana, The Essential Worldwide Monster Guide and his 2001 Caldecott Medal winner with Judith St. George, So, You Want To Be President?, it’s a bit of a shock to open David Small’s latest work, Stiches.
This is not a happy tale. There are no colourful, cheery-eyed children here. In fact, the whole book is black-and-white and filled with a lingering sense of eternal seasonal affective disorder. It is cinematic, with fadeouts of dark houses, dark memories and falling rain.
Stitches is autobiographical, telling the story of Small’s youth, first in a Detroit house defined by restrained anger or outright hostility. His mother sobbed and slammed cupboards, his brother beat his drums and his father beat a punching bag.
Small was a sickly boy, whose radiologist father regularly scanned him with massive amounts of X-rays. When a tumour inevitably develops he undergoes what he thinks is routine surgery. He wakes up with a giant gash across his neck and is missing one half of his voice box along with his voice. Only later does he find out he had cancer. And only later does he learn to speak again.
Small says the memories started pouring out of him when he began the project. Memories that he had forgotten. Little details of his youthful misery. “It definitely did start pouring out, but not in any organized manner for a long, long time,” he says.
“I thought the wisest thing to do was just let the memories come as they came. Memories don’t have any chronology.”
But it wasn’t the memories that were the most difficult thing about this project. There was confronting the demons of his past sure, but there was also the bureaucratic practice of editing his life down to a digestible length and style and putting it into an order that made sense. “That was probably one of the most difficult points in the making of this book because I realized I was going to have to put my life in the form of a college outline. Just try it yourself sometime, you’ll see what I’m talking about; it’s not easy,” he says.
“It seems like you’re cheating because everything in your life is important to you. But when you realize that the inclusion of your beloved Uncle Joe, or whoever, is not going to further the scene or the ark of the story, then Uncle Joe and his whole family have to go and that sort of thing.”
When he was 16, Small moved out on his own, sharing decrepit housing with a host of eccentric characters in urban Detroit. We are introduced to his crazy grandmother (really crazy) and watch as Small discovers art and some sad family secrets. It’s not a book his parents would have approved of and he’s not sure if he would have written it if they were still alive.
“I probably would have done it differently, but I don’t think so, I don’t know. My editor asked me a couple of months ago ‘What would your mother have thought, what would she have said to you if she was still alive and read this book?’ And I said ‘Well, she probably would have never spoken to me again.’ There was this pause and Bob said, ‘So nothing would have changed.’”
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