Thoughts on Stitches

This graphic memoir was really quite impressive. It's just so compelling -- to the point that you have to continue reading; you can't put the book down.

If only all authors could provide such deep and meaningful illustrations to their work like David Small. That'll be the day.



One particular thing that stood out to me in the novel was the shadows/shading. I noticed while I was flipping through the book, that from the beginning to the end, the shading became more prevalent. Panel by panel, everything became progressively a tad darker. I suppose this could be related to the loss of David's innocence - in a sense; the shading was generally light in the first section of the novel when David was just a young boy who was still fresh in the world. As the novel progressed, and as  David's life matured, he realized the state of his life and how dark it really is -- which is what he portrayed with the progressive and gradual shading.

Another example of the shading being used for effect are the dark times in David Small's life. Every time something like that happened, the pages surrounding the event were dark in contrast. This first really started around the time when he visited his grandparent's house. The scenes following their arrival had a very distinct difference in the amount of gray shading used; I feel like this was a way to show that this was in fact a dark time for Small, but at that moment in time when he was only six, he might not have realized how bleak it actually was, because the scenes were told in a less threatening manner.



Another aspect of the story I want to touch on is David's mother.We all know, she treated David like crap most of the time. She was rude and unloving.

 But why was she like this? Why would she treat David like this?


Well, one thought that can be inferred from the story is the idea that his grandmother also treated David's mother terribly. You can see this on page 101, when David is explaining why he's scared of his grandmother and his mother turns around with a frightened look on her face as well whenever she thinks she hears her grandmother nearby. This look on her face of child-like fear told us that she too was scared of her grandmother, which we might infer that she was probably abusive in one way or another.

Which, from pg. 68-72, you can tell from the rough life of David's grandmother that that might've been why his grandmother was possibly abusive/cruel to his mother when she was growing up. This abuse was then transferred over onto David, with this graphic novel as a result.

Another theory of mine, is the frustration and turmoil of David's mother because of her true sexual identity. On page 273, David explains that him eventually finding this out about her was "a moment she must have known was coming her whole life." Before 1974, homosexuality was considered and diagnosed as a mental disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychological Association. Besides this classification, in those decades that David's mother lived and grew up in, homosexuality was a seriously shunned practice. This forced his mother to marry a man she probably did not love, and to raise two kids with him. This pent-up frustration -- I theorize -- might have been another reason as to why David's mother treated him so poorly and "didn't love him."