Title Significance

The significance and meaning behind the title of David Small’s memoir, Stitches, can be directed towards a number of things. It isn’t until about half way through his memoir that the reader gets a glimpse of what his stitches look like. He illustrates them as almost 1950’s horror film like; slashed grotesquely across his throat. They resemble something you might have seen in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. David spent years struggling with identifying himself as anything but a man with his vocal debility and the scar to show for it.

His relationship with his mother and father were also one of great dysfunction. They struggled greatly as a family and the title stitches almost verbally illustrates how they were stitched together; two sides forced to be together and yet never originally meant to be as one.

Stitches can also be given the significance of what David had to do to piece himself back together after the torment he had been subject to throughout his younger childhood. It took him a long time of emotional struggle and the help of a therapist to piece things together they way they should be and only could be pieced together after what he had been through. The stitches are what were used to hold it all together.

All-in-all the title Stitches has a number of symbolic representation within David’s memoir, and truly only he can explain the relation of the title to his emotional meaning.

Small, David. Stitches: A Memior--. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Print