Honey for a Child's Heart

Everyone has a story. Even storytellers and illustrators. David Small, winner of prize after prize in children’s literature for his charming stories and art work, has his own story—one that has haunted him virtually his whole life. His wife, Sarah Stewart, shares his love of children’s books and is also a noted author who wrote The Gardener and The Library, both illustrated by David Small.

In the world of children’s books, Small’s incredible gift of imagination and art is something to treasure. Remember Imogene’s Antlers, the story of a little girl who wakes up one morning to find she has sprouted a huge rack of antlers? That book has sold more than a million copies. His hilarious work on So you Want to be President? won him the coveted Caldecott Medal. He illustrated Once Upon a Banana, a fun book with pictures so full of things to notice that children will be entertained for years. In 2008 he enlivened Heather Henson’s That Book Woman with his expressive paintings of a courageous woman who rides a horse into Appalachia to deliver books for children to read long before there were roads and libraries there. Currently he is working on lovely watercolors and pastels for Jane Yolen’s Elsie’s Bird, the story of a girl who grows up in a Nebraska sod hut and whose tough spirit helps her do more than survive. I am eager for its publication. In short, if you aren’t acquainted with David Small, you owe it to yourself to meet him soon. He has a magical touch on the drawing board.

Now he has done a picture book for grown-ups. It is called Stitches, a graphic memoir with stark black and white drawings (and few words) that convey the wretchedness he felt as a child growing up in Detroit with essentially silent and angry parents who seemed incapable of showing any love or approval to a sensitive boy. It is a blockbuster.

One reviewer described it as “emotionally raw, artistically compelling and psychologically devastating graphic memoir of childhood trauma.” How Small conveys all of this with his drawings is a marvel. He says he did the book to help himself more than anything else.

His father, a radiologist physician, disappeared to the basement when he arrived home each day, expressing his anger by pummeling a punching bag. His stern mother slammed cupboard doors to communicate and ruled the household in furious silence. As a child he was sickly and had sinus problems which his father treated with large doses of radiation. By the time he was 11 he had a growth on his neck, and at 14 he was whisked off to surgery with no one telling him that the growth was cancerous. He awoke to discover a long jagged scar on his neck, “a crusted black track of stitches” like laced boots. The botched surgery severed one of his vocal chords, leaving Small silent and invisible to the world.

Eventually David Small’s trauma led to therapy, something his guilt-producing mother used to remind him that “money doesn’t grow on trees!” In Stitches Small portrays his childhood therapist as a wise White Rabbit with a pocket watch. (He was fascinated as a kid by Alice in Wonderland and has his own experiences of falling down, down, down into a hole.) The therapist saved his life, but in doing so forced Small to begin to deal with the reality that his mother did not love him. Small found the sad truth liberating. “I remember falling down and hugging his knees,” he recalls. Week after week he went back to his office and received the care and love he needed, after which he returned to his heartless home. His relationship with his mother deteriorated to the point where he feared the extent of her wrath. “My mom kept a rifle behind the door,” he says, “and I thought she would come into my bedroom with her rifle and kill me.” He fearfully barricaded himself in his bedroom at night, moving a chest in front of the door. He left home at 16.

How he portrays the agony of this in his drawings is a thing of wonder. It has been a kind of purging for him to do this book. When he was finished he called his brother, whom he hadn’t talked to in fifty years and sent him a copy of the book. His brother Ted, a percussionist with the Colorado Symphony said, “David, your book blew me away. It’s like a snapshot of our youth.” Then he asked if he could show it to his therapist and to his two grown sons. Soon after this he came for a visit with David. Recalling this, Small remarks, “Now I know why we parted. We couldn’t tolerate anything or anybody who reminded us of that time. Now I have my brother back, and that is huge.”

Small’s editor at W. W. Norton, calls Small “brilliant” and says that when he started looking at this book, he immediately went crazy over it. “This is extraordinary art. This is a man of incredible depth.” Small says, “We have to face these damaging family traditions to get away from them. Otherwise, we perpetuate it ourselves.”

Meanwhile he feels some shyness about sharing his past life so openly. “My heart has been in my throat,” he says, “since I saw this in print.” But he leads an almost idyllic life today, doing what he loves to do, and deeply loved by his wife Sarah Stewart, whom he credits with giving him the happiness he now enjoys.

Read Stitches! You, too, will be blown away.