It is one thing for an artist to credit his career choice to an unhappy youth in which opportunities for self-expression were perpetually stifled, and quite another for an artist to say that his parents literally took his voice from him. That, however, is the story of David Small’s life as he tells it in “Stitches,” a graphic memoir, which comes out this week.

Roughly a half century ago, when Mr. Small was 14, he underwent an operation his parents told him was to remove a cyst in his neck but which he discovered by chance had been throat cancer. The surgery left him without one of his vocal cords or his thyroid gland. And, for nearly a decade, he couldn’t speak above a hoarse whisper.

The matter of young David’s cancer was not discussed in the Smalls’ Detroit house except for a brief occasion a year after the operation. His father, an aloof and withholding radiologist, attempted to unburden himself of the knowledge that the extensive radiation treatments he had performed on his son had caused the cancer. “In those days we gave any kid born with breathing difficulty X-rays,” his father confesses in the book. “Two to four hundred rads. I gave you cancer.”

For a while after the operation, Mr. Small said recently, “I took it as a punishment  sort of this ‘We’ve been telling you to shut up for years, now we’re finally making you shut up.’ ”