The White Rabbit

After reading David Smalls Stiches A Memoir I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between David and Alice, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There is the obvious playground incident when David was young, where he goes to the local park with a yellow towel on his head, pretending to be Alice with her magic blonde hair. There are many subtle references throughout this novel, David jumping into his own world of drawings, and the therapist, but one there’s is one I noticed only after watching the original 1951 film Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  In the first scene of the movie we meet Alice and who I now understand to be her sister, they are outside in a beautiful garden area. Alice is sitting in a tree with Dina, her cat, while her older sister recites passages from a history book. Alice is daydreaming while talking Dina; she goes on to say that if she ever wrote a book it would be filled with nothing but pictures. I don’t know if David Smalls ever saw the film, I would assume he would have because of his love of Alice as a young boy, but I do find it fascinating that Smalls wrote a book, a graphic novel entirely based on the idea of pictures. Although his memoir is quite dark and revealing there is some humor within the pages, his attention to the “little man in the jar” and the realistic depiction of his family, but this is no wonderland.

Alice is on an adventure to follow the white rabbit; although she does not know the rabbit she follows him. In Stitches David’s therapist is his white rabbit, he does not know this man or where he is going with their meeting but he listens to him. Being one of, or the most, honest, encouraging people in David’s life may have played a part in his future of perusing art as a career, and writing graphic novels. Something as little as a compliment can go a long way, especially when someone has never been predisposed to compliments or personal recognition before.

I found myself questioning if David Smalls would be the person he is today without having met his white rabbit? If David’s therapist had never seen his drawings would he have continued to see them as inadequate, or would David have found the confidence on his own and realized how good of an artist he was/is? These are all questions I was left wondering about at the end of the book.  This Memoir was written/illustrated later in Smalls life; in his teen and young adult years something may have sparked an appreciation for his own artwork, but I think it was the therapist that initiated David’s confidence in himself, and later on in his work.