Cover Stories is a series in which book designers discuss their work: concepts that didn’t make the final cut and the cover as published.

Glen David Gold’s memoir, “I Will Be Complete,” is nearly 500 pages, and recounts his 20s, his college years and his event-filled youth after his mother moved to New York and left him, at 12, temporarily alone in her San Francisco apartment. The length of the book, and the amount of ground it covers, made the prospect of designing a cover for it “a little intimidating,” said Tyler Comrie, a senior designer at Knopf who was given the task.

“There’s a part in the book where Glen stumbles on a puberty chart, when he was 14 or so,” Comrie said. “This presented a perfect opportunity: Three different stages of his life, all tied together with this thing he finds in the book and causes a lot of self-reflection. I was wishing he had dug this one a little bit more. In the end, I think there was too much humor. It made the book seem lighter than it is.”