Instead of the traditional and mainstream verbal memoir, David Small chose to confine into an autobiological memoir, Stitches: A Memoir, with a comic medium that details the darkest periods of his childhood as a prelude to healing. Small demonstrates the rough parts of his past that shaped his life and the relationships between himself and his dysfunctional family by encoding these moments into vividly drawn emotions and sensations. Small experienced traumatic things both physical and psychological, yet despite this, he was able to work through it. This way of using graphic text was David’s take on using illustrations as an outlet to deal with traumatic experiences.
On the outside, David’s family is just like any other ordinary family. His mother, Betty, a stay at home mom and his father a radiologist. As the memoir unfolds in front of the reader, it is clear that David is deprived of a basic emotional support system from his parents. This household is very passive aggressive and silent that is mainly due to David’s parents and the lack of communication between family members. At the age of seven, a lump is discovered on David’s neck, and instead of taking care of it, David’s parents chose to wait and go on a shopping spree (Small 137-143). After a couple years, the lump is finally taken care of, but the surgery for the lump would turned out more extensive than expected. David wakes up from his operation to find that he cannot speak because during his operation the doctors