Catharsis

David's graphic essay on the process of starting "Stitches": http://www.publishersweekly.com/images/DSmall_web_650px.jpg?fullurl=/contents/images/DSmall_web_650px.jpg (click on it to enlarge)

Brothers

David's brother is present in the book, but with the exception of a couple of scenes, he's pretty invisible. Here is an interesting section of an interview with David about his brother:

Do you have any particular hopes for the book?

Something remarkable has happened because of it, already. About two years ago in February, I got a call from my editor. He was very concerned about the latest memoir publishing scandal, where the publisher was frantically shredding 75,000 copies of a book by a woman in L.A. who had claimed she'd grown up in a drug culture; her sister wrote to the newspaper and said she was lying.

Anyway, he quite rightly didn't want that to happen to his publisher, and not on his watch, so he said, "David, tell me, is there anybody still alive who might disagree with your viewpoint of these events?"

I said, "Well, I do have this brother." He said, "Have you shown it to him?" I said, "No. I told him I was doing it because he's in it, but it's not about him." And he said, "You have to show it to him." I said, "Bob, the last time I spoke with my brother, I told him to go fuck himself and that I never wanted to talk to him or hear about him again." And he said, "That's too bad, but you've got to show him the book."

So I emailed my brother and asked him if he would take a look at it. And actually I thought, because his wife had died about two months before, it might be interesting to him, to take his mind off it. I sent him a copy of the ARC.

After four days, I called him up, and I said, "What did you think of the book?" There was a long, dreadful pause on the other end of the phone. And then my brother spoke in his sepulchral, Nixonian tones, and he said, "David, your book blew me away."

I said, "Really?" He said, "Yes. It's like a snapshot of my youth," his voice getting more lively. He said, "I don't know how you did it. It's like you brought everyone back to life. They look the way they looked. Everything's exactly the way it was."

I said, "That's wonderful!" He said, "Do you mind if I show it to my therapist?" And I said, "No! What a great idea. And congratulations, by the way, on being in therapy." Then he wanted to know if he could show it to his sons, and I said, "Yes, that will probably help them understand you better."

Miraculous to say, four months later he was at my house. This is somebody whom I hadn't spoken to in fifty years. He came to our house, and he spent four days...

I'm sorry, how many years did you say?

Well, he's sixty-seven and I'm sixty-four. He might have been ten and I was six when our relationship broke off. We hated each other while we were in the house, and then he moved away, and I never really talked to him again. When we did it was always difficult.

I think what was basically going on — no, I know what was going on: Neither of us wanted anything or anybody in our lives that reminded us of our young lives.

Once this book was there, both of us could see these people again, and see them going through these situations in a way that made us both realize we had nothing to do with the anguish in that family, and there's no reason to feel guilty about it anymore.

I'll tell you, if nothing else happens with this book, it would be worth doing it just for that.

David's dreams

The dream sequences in the book were really great. What do you make of David's recurring dream of crawling through successively smaller doors into the bombed interior of a church?

Next pick

Start on May 26?

Mother

In his epilogue, David sounds pretty forgiving of his mother, seemingly attributing her horrible coldness to her health problems and secret life as a lesbian. Do you suppose this is a coping mechanism? Or a just a very mature show of empathy?

Sounds of silence

I was struck by all the silence in the book. It was amazing how much of the story was told with only the drawings.

Pages would go by without any dialogue between the characters. Most of the emotions are communicated through glares or little coughs or slamming cabinets. It seemed almost fitting that after growing up in a household of silence, David's voice is taken by cancer.

Alice

What do you think is David's fascination with "Alice in Wonderland"? He dresses up as Alice, he fantasizes falling down the rabbit hole in his drawing, he even draws his psychologist as the White Rabbit.

Graphic memoir

What did you think of "Stitches"? Did you like the graphic format?

Kim and I have talked before about how nonfiction works better in the graphic style than fiction. Did you find that to be true with "Stitches"? And why do you think that is?

The come-to-mother moment

I love the scene in the book where Henry's mom tells him she's ashamed of him for "thinking like that," that is, for only thinking of Miss Channing and Mr. Reed and their romance and never once wondering where Mrs. Reed was as they were happily strolling on the beach. At that moment, Henry realizes that his mother has seen the whole story from Mrs. Reed's perspective, and it's an absolute shock to him because he was convinced that there was only one reading of the situation. He whispers, in what struck me as the emotional high point of the book,"I'm sorry, Mother."

Then he writes:

What she did next stunned me with its uncompromising force. "You're all alike, Henry, all you men."

(Honestly, I had a flicker of respect for her just then, bitter as she was, just because most mothers seem to think their sons are the exception and easily excuse their sexist mentality instead of calling them to the mat on it! Not that I think Henry was sexist per se, but it's good for all people to be forced into an awareness of this is how the other half lives).

She stared at me for one long, ghastly moment, then turned and walked away, leaving me in a world that had begun to move again, though differently than it had before, filled with greater complications, a weave of consequences and relations that seemed larger than romance, deeper and more enduring, though still distant from my understanding, a world I'd only just briefly glimpsed, as it were, through my mother's eyes.

It's his moment of maturity, of compassion, of realizing, to paraphrase Hamlet, that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

And later, this notion is reinforced when he asks Sarah why Miss Channing and Mr. Reed are such cowards, why they don't just do what they want. And Sarah says, "They aren't cowards" (presumably because it's harder to not give in to personal urges than to let them hold sway).

Then Henry ruminates:

... we have never discovered why, given the brevity of life and the depth of our need and the force of our passions, we do not pursue our own individual happiness with an annihilating zeal, throwing all else to the wind. We only know that we don't, and that all our goodness, our only claim to glory, resides in this inexplicable devotion to things other than ourselves.

So he develops this sense of empathy and the belief that you must consult things other than your own passions as you move through life, which is good, but where did that get him? He gets this advice, makes these discoveries, and what is he left with? Does he abandon passion and romance, in that black-and-white mentality Erin noted? His father instills in him a sense of responsibility that is compassionate but stern, and his mother instills in him a sense more harsh than loving, and he's surrounded by adults in loveless relationships, who seem only in them because of a vow they made ages ago ... What is he supposed to think? That once you commit to someone, even if it turns out to be a bad choice, that you are duty-bound to stay your whole life? That that's what being a "good man" is? And yet it's terrible to be self-centered, too. I can see why he felt paralyzed and afraid to live! There were no role models for him of people who successfully incorporated romance and duty into their lives.