Author of the week: David Small

last updated 8 January 2015

Author and illustrator David Small has learned that honesty pays, said Christopher Walton in the Detroit Free Press. In a long career creating children’s books, Small crafted work that he considers benignly deceitful. “When you write children’s books, you have to lie,” he says. But it’s the brute candor of Stitches, his first book for adults, that has led critics to label the cartoon memoir a “masterpiece.” Stitches recounts how Small’s father, a physician, endangered his son’s life by trying to treat his asthma with radiation. A malignant tumor resulted, and during the surgery to remove it, Small, then 14, lost his voice. Neither his father nor his mother would admit how close he had come to death. Silence was the household code.

Small regained his voice a decade later, and eventually regained a brother by breaking the family taboo, said Terri Finch Hamilton in the Grand Rapids, Mich., Press. Because he fled home at 16, Small hadn’t spoken with his younger brother, Ted, for almost 50 years when he tracked him down to corroborate his memory of events. “I know now why we parted,” David says. “We couldn’t tolerate anything or anybody who reminded us of that time.” Ted Small immediately asked if he could share the book with his therapist. “That’s when I knew I did something good,” David says. The two men are friends again, which makes Small happier than any praise he might receive. “I have my brother back,” he says. “That’s huge.”