Stitches is the harrowing account of Small’s childhood growing up in a 1950s Midwestern home where no one speaks. His mother expresses herself through the slamming of cabinet doors. His father pummels a punching bag in the basement. His brother beats on drums in his room. In this environment, the young David Small retreats into his art and into his imagination.

At age 14, David goes into hospital to have a cyst removed from his neck. He’s told it’s a routine operation but when he wakes up, he has stitches from ear to chest, and only one vocal cord. For the next 10 years he can no longer speak in anything above a whisper. He later finds out that his cyst was cancer. But no one’s told him this. It’s the first of many secrets that are revealed to him or that he uncovers by accident.

A book about voicelessness and secrets lends itself to graphic form, and Stitches has been roundly praised. The Washington Post called it “brilliant and heartbreaking.” Library Journal wrote, “Small’s art lifts his memoir into the extraordinary.” Stitches was also short-listed for a 2009 National Book Award.

I was excited to get my hands on the book prior to Small’s talk at Harvard. But when I went to the Lamont Library, where the memoir had been held on reserve, I couldn’t check it out. Due to a kink with my borrowing privileges, I was told I couldn’t even remove it from the lending desk. “But I have to read it for class.” “You can read it over there.” The Librarian pointed me to an easy chair, situated five feet from the security desk, with its bright florescent light and constant parade of patrons.

I settled into my seat resentfully, and then I opened the book. Stark industrial landscapes in Detroit give way to an empty street where all of the homes look alike. The reader is then led into the open door of one of these homes, through the living room, where a young boy is drawing on the floor, and into the kitchen, where a woman is doing the dishes. “Momma had her little cough.” I was immediately sucked in. Three hundred and twenty-nine pages later, I lifted my head and found myself again in the bright light of the library entrance, blinking, disoriented.

I recently caught up with David Small by phone from his home in Michigan to talk about Stitches.

“Graphic novel” is a form that now encompasses all kinds of storytelling, fictional and factual. As someone who’s made a career as an illustrator, how would you compare reading pictures vs. reading words?

I wasn’t a fan of the graphic novel before I did one. I’ve always been interested in the worldless form, in picture books, but an entire novel in complex ideas and pictures? I’d not seen anything aside from Maus that made me want to try it. Then a Parisian friend showed me some graphic novels from his shelf. Here were some very sophisticated themes being dealt with and the art was terrific, much less raw than a lot of the stuff being done in America. That’s one of the problems with graphic novels. Who wants to spend 400 pages looking at what each picture means? You don’t often see good art and good story combined, and that’s what I saw happening in those French books. And I thought, “I can do that.”

Did Stitches come to you first in images, or in words?

It first came in memories, which are like images. But I had to write things out before I could draw them. I think that writing gives a kind of structure that images can’t. Writing is left-brained and drawing is right-brained. I think the left brain has the organizational frame work that helps to give the order to the chaos of memory that’s necessary to make a story that’s comprehensible to the reader, and also to the writer. I could draw all day but not in any form that would cohere.

Also, since I’m not a very good writer, drawing helped get me started. There was a tremendous relief because the visual language is much more my thing, my milieu. Also, because my story is about being wordless, being forbidden to speak as a child, and then having my voice taken away, the graphic form seemed perfect.

The New Yorker compared your book to silent film. And in many ways, Stitches could be a storyboard for a movie.

Absolutely, but it’s not a movie.  It’s a book that was influenced by film.

Who were the influences?

Bergman. Hitchcock. Polanski. Buñuel—his simple way of telling a story. Psycho is brilliant visual storytelling. The camera swoops into a particular building, then into a window. It carries the viewer. But there are writers who do this too. Flaubert will take you away from Madame Bovary’s room and take you into the landscape and the light, and it will tell you about the experience she’s going through. That was a cinematic technique he devised before there was any cinema.

During your talk at Harvard you described the importance of stripping away writing. How difficult was this for you?

I resisted it a first. It was my wife who kept saying, “You really ought to try paring this down to a silent book if you can.” I resisted. I felt dependent on language. But then I saw the sense of it and I made it my own. The words were so poorly done.  It goes along with the whole problem of picture books if the author is not the illustrator. The author doesn’t need to say that the character has a bathrobe on if they have a bathrobe on in the picture. The author has to cut his precious text. I had to go through this process myself.

How did you decide what to strip away? How did you find your themes?

In your life everything and everybody is important. But to a reader they’re not. What helped me was my editor Bob Weil telling me to find leitmotifs and encourage the ones that I already had going. Alice in Wonderland was a leitmotif and it became a great connecting mechanism. The dreams are the connecting thing, too. Rather than picking my themes, it was a matter of recognizing them and discarding some of the subplots that seemed essential, but really weren’t.

In the memoir, you write about your desire, as a child, to escape through art. And the conclusion of one chapter shows an illustrated David Small actually diving into the page. But David Small the author creates this world through drawing. Was it hard to recreate and return to such a painful world?

Absolutely. It was very painful, and for that reason I was very reluctant to do it. That was the root of my problem. I was still caught in that world, in a way. My brother and I avoided each other for 50 years because neither of us wanted to be reminded of that world. I didn’t want to see him because I saw he was recreating the life we had in Detroit. He bought the same kind of house we grew up in. Furnished it the same. Married a hypochondriac. And he was just this sort of silent, passive aggressive guy, just like our family. I had no respect for that. And I hated seeing it in myself.

What was it like to recreate your mother in such a graphic way?

It was thrilling, in a way, to bring her back to life. The power of being able to resurrect the dead in a picture, as well as all of those places I can’t revisit because they don’t exist anymore. But seeing her on the page, scrutinizing my every move, I felt like she was going take my voice away. I felt it so strongly when I started drawing. And I began to get very tense.

It was during that time that [my wife] Sarah and I were at a restaurant. I was resting my hand on my neck and I could feel this swelling. The tumor, that had taken years and years to develop before, seemed to be coming back in a manner of minutes. I thought it was a hallucination until I saw Sarah’s face and she went pale. She could see it happening. She shoved a glass of wine at me and said, “Drink this,” and I did. Then I got up, went into the bathroom to check, and there indeed was this lump exactly like at 14. I realized at that moment that if I didn’t let it out somehow, it was going to kill me. This was proof. I would have died right there in that john if I hadn’t got a grip. This is not going to happen. I’m going to make this book.

How did authoring and drawing your story change your perspective on it?

When I was creating my mother and myself I suddenly realized the size difference. It really matters! When you’re six and you’re in that body, the grown ups look like giants. But then I drew myself and thought, “That little powerless thing. How could you treat a creature like that, who is so dependent?” It made me realize my position in a totally different way. I was not responsible for my mother’s unhappiness. I was just this little kid trying to be a kid and getting through the day.

You’ve illustrated many award winning children’s books including Imogene’s Antlers and The Gardener. How did your style of drawing change for Stitches? 

First I eliminated color. We have such an emotional reaction to every color. To have to think about whether I should put in a red or ochre in every panel for 300 pages, it would have killed me. I wanted a black and white book, like the films of Bergman. To strip away color gets to the issues more directly. Then, I tried to develop a style that was more like handwriting. You can see my early books I can draw a hand like nobody’s business. But in Stitches it’s reduced to its gesture. I would do the gesture in a single line if possible, just to speed the process up and not be bogged down by making everything accurate.

Was it strange to go from tales of wonder to this darker story? Did you feel like you had to negotiate between two worlds?

Not for me. I had a foot in both worlds for my whole career. I was an editorial artist for magazines like The New Yorker and the Times for years. I wanted to be an editorial artist before a children’s illustrator, but it turns out my strength was in picture books. It was a relief to have the reins taken off [with Stitches]. Because when you work for kids you want to be careful about the language you’re using and the way you depict. Books can have dark humor, like Imogene. But the last thing I want to do is take away hope.

The afterward to Stitches was strangely moving. After getting to know your family as illustrated characters it was startling to see them in photographs, as real people, with their own histories, their own problems. Why’d you do it?

I think my first impulse was childish. I wanted to show everyone that I drew my mom and dad like they looked. Then I thought, wait… it’s an important thing to show the human beings behind the story. To see the people makes it easier to understand them. That’s the process that I went through. To go from feeling they were monsters to thinking they were doing the best they could. They really weren’t the malevolent beings I thought they were. I’m not saying the book was act of forgiveness, but an act of understanding close to forgiveness.

Your book is about secrets but in writing and touring this book you’re exposing those secrets to everyone. Is that strange for you?

It doesn’t bother me. They’re dead. The fact I walked in on my mother and her lover, that was something she was probably expecting all her life. In fact, a lot of people knew about it but couldn’t admit it to themselves. That’s the interesting thing about these secrets. They’re out in the light. It’s family and friends who willingly choose to ignore them.

Your parents were dead by the time you wrote Stitches, but your brother is still alive. What was his reaction?

I was forced to show it to him, in a nascent state, because of a publishing scandal that occurred three years ago, where a woman had lied about her memoir. The publisher lost a lot of money. My publisher was concerned that anyone who was still alive who shared my experience might have a different memory. I had to admit my terrible relationship with my brother and send him the book. He took me aback. “I love this book,” he said. “It’s a terrific story.” “What do you think about it as a family history?” “It’s a snapshot of my youth. It took me right back.”

How did it change your relationship?

We’re friends. We talk. We call one another. He’s quite a good film critic. I don’t know if we’ll be best friends, but we’re brothers again.

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Alysia Abbott is a writer and former WNYC radio producer. Her work recently aired on KRCC and has appeared in a number of anthologies and publications, including Time Out and Salon.com. She is currently working on a memoir about her own childhood.

Your books seem to be both scholarly and populist. The First Tycoon is very readable, and I wondered, was this a conscious decision that you made, and how difficult is it to marry those two?

I believe that there is no reason why we have to sacrifice scholarly standards and investigation for reading pleasure. If we think of the great works of literature, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction, they’re a real treat to read. What I like to do in my writing is to tell good stories and ask big questions. I like to write about the making of the modern world. I want to write books that are about complex characters that tell compelling stories, and I want to give the reader a reason to turn every page.

Even when I’m discussing an issue, when I’m presenting information, my rule is if it’s not advancing the story it doesn’t belong on the page. I don’t want to simply provide information or analysis because I know it. It has to be something that makes the reader think and want to read more. I want it to be a part of a cohesive narrative—something that is significant and goes to the heart of what this person is all about and what the events are all about.

How—and when—did you determine what your themes would be, what the point of this book would be?

I came in with certain questions, but certain questions presented themselves as I went along. I knew, for example, that I wanted to bring out the drama of this very physical and dramatic life. I knew I wanted to write about the creation of the modern corporate economy.

But there are a number of important themes that I really only discovered in the process of writing the book. One of them is the way in which we think about the role of the government in the economy, and how that’s gone through dramatic changes. That was something that I didn’t anticipate exploring to the extent I did, and yet it was very much what Vanderbilt’s life was about—modern ideas about government regulation and about corporate powers, America’s transition from an 18^th century hierarchical society to an individualistic competitive commercial society.

And then one of the larger themes which really speaks to what we’ve been through recently—the way in which economic reality was undergoing an abstraction in the 19th century. The idea of a corporation, and the way that money ceased to be simply precious metal coins and became paper money that was a government-issued marker. Stocks and bonds, and the way the financial markets began to develop—all these were huge changes in American culture and in the way that our minds work. It was a real struggle for people to cope with it and understand it. This was a major theme and it’s still something we struggle with today. I had no idea how topical, how pertinent, how contemporary these themes would be as I was writing the book.

I set out to be true to the work, true to the subject, to carry out my investigation with integrity. I didn’t try to teach lessons to the present. And yet the present sort of imposed itself after I’d completed the book.

Talk about how you went about conducting your research.

I found out after I got the contract to write the book why there had not been a biography of Vanderbilt in so long. It’s because he left no collection of papers. And the research process, one year after another after another, was a real struggle, bringing it all together. I really despaired of finishing it at certain points, because it took much longer than I anticipated.

I didn’t realize that so much could be had—there was so much material that would shed light on his life—but that it would take so much work to get at it.

For instance, as I would investigate at the New York Public Library, I found letter after letter from people who were dealing with Vanderbilt during a period that was previously largely unknown, the 1830s and 40s. Old lawsuits provided insights into his personal life and his dealings, lawsuits from his passengers during the gold rush who were stranded in Nicaragua and came to see Vanderbilt in his office. They would describe what his office was like, and where his desk was, and how he put on his reading glasses, just vivid descriptions, contemporary descriptions that I had no idea existed when I started the process. I had no idea it would take so long to pull it all together, and that there was so much of it.

Tell me about how you made the characters come alive.

Since Vanderbilt didn’t leave a collection of his own papers, I had to circle around his life and look at all the people who lived around him. And that had the unexpected benefit of fleshing out all of these other characters who surrounded him.

One of the pitfalls for a biographer is that you get so focused on your main subject that you forget to flesh out the other characters. I was forced to pay attention to the secondary characters, which I think—I hope—helped make my book more enjoyable.

For example, the anti-hero of my book was his son, who was the opposite of everything he was. He was a gambling addict, he was verbose, he was boastful, he was self-loathing, and he wrote incessantly. And so he sheds light on these hidden emotional sides of his father’s life. And he himself emerges as this full character. Because I had to go to his letters to understand his father, I was also able to flesh out this son and his tortured life as well, which I think makes the main story a little richer.

When you talk about your work, you use the word ‘investigate.’ I’m assuming you see it as something different from research.

Research is at the core of what I do. Investigate involves intellectual engagement, and thinking about what matters, and thinking about where this information I found leads me. An example is I’ve often read historical accounts that describe a subject in the 19th century called “stock-watering”—increasing the number of shares in a company. I hadn’t run across a real discussion of why it was such a bad thing. Historians would condemn it because their 19th century sources would condemn it.

Whereas, Warren Buffet just carried out a 50-1 stock split when he acquired Burlington Northern. Nobody is complaining. It’s simply changing the number of shares in your company. But in the 19th century he would have been viciously condemned for doing that. Research would tell me that Vanderbilt was criticized for stock-watering. Investigation is saying, well, why? What does this mean? What does this tell us about the way that people envisioned the economy in the 19th century? What does it tell us about how the idea of the corporation was different then than it is now?

I see investigation as a matter of trying to take nothing for granted—trying to really get inside a world and to assume that just because they use the same words not to assume that they meant the same thing.

Investigation is research, plus creatively analyzing and thinking about the meaning of what you’ve researched.

How long did you think the book was going to take, and how long did it take?

I thought it would take about two years. I thought I would spend a year or so researching and a year or so putting it together. The entire process was about seven years. I basically worked on it full-time; it was really my main endeavor for over six years. I was joking to friends that if I won (the National Book Award) I would ask the audience to have a moment of silence for the 401K that gave its life so that this book could live.

In your acceptance speech, you thanked your designers and copy editors, which made me wonder—can you envision someone reading The First Tycoon on a Kindle?

Oh, sure. My remarks were not meant to be a slam on e-books. My point was with the advent of e-books, there’s a danger that some people will start to think that all people who make my book no longer matter. Librarians, book reviewers, the bookstore clerks and owners—all of the people who inhabit the culture of the book but don’t get the attention the authors do. No book exists without them. Like in any ecosystem, one species cannot survive by itself.

Even an e-book is edited, it is proofread, it is copy edited, it is designed. That’s not the typeface that comes out of the author’s word processor. Even in the Kindle there is a designed page.

Personally, I think e-books are and will be simply one more format. The codex is not going to disappear. It’s a brilliant technology. It’s got a wonderful operating system that never crashes, it has a great power source that never fails, the information in it does not degrade over time, it is a wonderful way to store and access information. It will not disappear.

I do wonder, though, if the digital world will make life more difficult for future biographers, because there won’t necessarily be that wealth of letters that you talk about.

Yeah, why do you think I’m writing about dead people? I completely agree, and it’s kind of ironic—in a way we’re all writing much more than we were ten or twenty years ago because we’re constantly texting or e-mailing, and yet it’s so ephemeral, it’s all disappearing. So yes, future biographers are going to have a very hard time.