Trauma and Young Adult Literature: Representing adolescence and knowledge in David Small's Stitches: A Memoir

Abstract

This essay focuses on the graphic memoir Stitches, written by award winning children's picture book author and illustrator, David Small. Unlike Small's other projects aimed at school-aged children, including So You Want to be the President? and Imogene's Antlers, Stitches is a graphic trauma narrative intended for an older audience. Through a visual language of gray shadows and bold, off-center outlines, Small's comics chronicle his traumatic coming-of-age, including psychological abuse within his family, and radiation-induced cancer. When Stitches was nominated for a National Book Award in the young people's literature category rather than in the adult category, its placement exposed assumptions about the line between young adult (YA) and adult literature. Drawing on theories of trauma and self-representation, we consider how the placement of Stitches within the YA category and the ensuing controversy calls into crisis how youth is framed, by and for whom, and with what limitations. Graphic storytelling allows Small to engage with traumatic material visually and in turn to expose conventional ideas about youthful knowledge, agency, and witness.

Keywords:

• memoir
• trauma
• adolescence
• youth
• young adult literature
• David Small

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The authors gratefully acknowledge that the images from Stitches are used with the permission of David Small and W.W. Norton.

Notes

1. Hereafter, we use young adult and YA interchangeably.

2. See Falconer for an analysis of children's novels, including the Harry Potter series, as global crossover texts. Beckett provides an overview of crossover texts and the relationship among readership, authors, and the children's literature industry.

3. Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted provides another example of a coming-of-age memoir that crossed the marketing categories of adult/young adult and raised questions about appropriate readership, see Marshall “Borderline” for a more detailed analysis.

4. Small's picture book for young readers, Imogene's Antlers, about a young girl who wakes up with antlers on her head works through similar material about a child's body being radically altered and parents who are ill equipped to deal with this change, is a precursor to Stitches.

5. Our decision to choose Stitches as a case study is the result of an analysis of the representation of adolescence and trauma in the 17th memoirs that received an Alex award from 1998 to 2011.

6. For a critical analysis of the memoir boom and trauma, see Gilmore Limits (1–15).

7. For an in-depth discussion of Wertham, the subcommittee hearings, and the CMAA, see Wright.

8. For a recent example, see Gurdon and Alexie's response to her article.

9. The reaction to Small's representation of adolescence and family is similar to Kathryn Harrison's use of adolescence in her controversial memoir The Kiss, see Marshall “Disenchantment.”