num_pages: 329
description: Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award and finalist for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards: the prize-winning childrens author depicts a childhood from hell in this searing yet redemptive graphic memoir.One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.In Stitches Small the award-winning childrens illustrator and author re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out one by one we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where Davida highly anxious yet supremely talented childall too often became the unwitting object of his parents buried frustration and rage.Believing that they were trying to do their best Davids parents did just the reverse. Edward Small a Detroit physician who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag was convinced that he could cure his young sons respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation possibly causing Davids cancer. Elizabeth Davids mother tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions especially her own were hidden.Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteenwith nothing more than the dream of becoming an artistwill resonate as the ultimate survival statement.A silent movie masquerading as a book Stitches renders a broken world suddenly seamless and beautiful again. Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award (Young Adult); finalist for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (Best Writer/Artist: Nonfiction; Best Reality-Based Work).
language: English
title: Stitches: A Memoir
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company