The overview

In reading Stitches a Memoir by David Small, I not only enjoyed it and believe it is truly a beautiful book but I took the pleasure in the way he presents his life story even to the way he illustrates it as well. This is the first book I got to read that is in this type of format I’ve never read a book with so much detailed illustrations and that caught my attention. I have never been the type of person to actually sit down and put my time into reading a book, but I enjoyed this book so much I even read it twice, carefully studying all the images.

                David presents his family as angry and aggravated, taking a second look at the book and just analyzing the images you can see the anger and rage in all of them. One I can reflect on would be the grandmother because like David and his relationship with his grandmother was not good, it reminded  me of my grandmother who had the same southern accent which he also demonstrates extreme examples of dialogue which you can see to a grave extent.

Living with all that anger lead him to have some bazaar and terrifying dreams, an image I find very disturbing in this book would be that of the little frame of Christ mocking grandma “He was a durn little fool” (Small 104). Also another dream which seemed really strange would be that of the little bat. You see the bat running from the rain looking for “mama”, Mama in a sense is supposed to have the responsibility of being a strictly protective person, someone who should be there for their children but in this dream the bat looks for her but isn’t there when he needs her. When he finds the umbrella which to me represents its self as mama, is completely torn into pieces and does not protect him from anything.  Visualizing what he dreams and not just reading it makes the story so much more interesting. Without these images I don’t believe I would have taken so much interest in this book.