The book Stitches: A Memoir

Stitches is a brilliant graphic novel that tells you a story of David's life growing up and how he was abused, as well as lacking love from his parents.

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I remembered when I first bought this book for English class flipping through the pages and wondering why we were going to read and discuss a comic book. It was kind of weird as I begin to read a couple of pages before I went to class, but as soon as class started and we begin to discuss about Stitches it was fairly interesting.

As we were assigned to read part of the book for the next class day I caught myself reading the whole book that night. It’s not long but it actually caught my attention with all the graphic pictures and how he was so creative with all the expressions that he showed in the book.  Facial expressions and his clever illustrations told a story alone. He developed narrative and emotional reactions with almost ten chronological pages of only panels without using any text. This was an incredible way to capture the reader’s attention.

From all the books I have read, I have never picked up or even thought about a graphic novel. I guess I never gave it a chance. With no choice for reading Stitches, I’m thrilled that I had a chance to discover a different way of reading. I have changed my perspective on graphic novels completely.

The author made a great decision to tell a story about David’s life through pictures. I honestly think that if he wrote about his life the traditional way with no pictures, it wouldn’t be as interesting to read. By reading a graphic novel you have the luxury to read it three different ways. You can go through the book not looking at the photographs and only reading the dialogue. You also can go through the book by only observing the pictures and try to get a sense of what the story is trying to explain. Lastly, you have the choice of reading the dialogue and observing the pictures at the same time. I did all three. By doing that, I learned that it’s a great way to get a better understanding of the book. 

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The fact that there wasn’t any color except black, white, and grey was ingenious. It was original even though comic books are also sometimes black and white. The color scheme throughout the book symbolizes all of the emotions and his dark childhood. There were pictures in the novel that had different angles that was unique. It wasn’t always parallel towards the character but more upward to actually get a better view of the illustration. For instance, like when he was in the elevator. He did a great job showing all the different pictures of the elevator opening and David pressing all of the buttons at once. The author also showed him observing the fetus and in the manner of him imagining the fetus jumping out the jar and running after him. The whole book is amazing how he took the readers on an adventure about how his life was growing up with the creative drawings.