little scratch

by Rebecca Watson Narrated by Rebecca Watson

Overview

A unique audiobook experience, written and performed by one of the most talented young authors to have emerged in recent British fiction.
NOMINATED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOT PRIZE
'Extraordinary' New Yorker
little scratch tells the story of a day in the life of an unnamed woman, living in a lower-case world of demarcated fridge shelves and office politics; clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications. In a voice that is fiercely wry, touchingly delicate and increasingly neurotic, the protagonist relays what it takes to get through the quotidian detail of that single trajectory - from morning to night - while processing recent sexual violence.
little scratch is about the coexistence of monotony with our waking, intelligent lives. It is a powerful evocation of how the external and internal aspects of our lives exist in a helix and what it means to live out the course of a single day consumed by trauma.
`I found myself unable to stop listening' ***** Netgalley reviewer.
Rebecca Watson is Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times. Her work has been published in the Times Literary Supplement and Granta. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.
`A daringly experimental debut' The Guardian
`[An] astonishing debut' Financial Times
`An incredible debut... It'll be on every prize list' Stylist Magazine picks for 2021
`Startlingly original' Vogue
'Wry, funny and heartbreaking' Sophie Mackintosh
'little scratch is a story that is urgent. It is a story that needs to be told' Meena Kandasamy
'Reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion... daring and completely readable' Colin Barrett
'little scratch is a little miracle... impossible to read it and not wish there were more books like it' Alan Trotter
'Confident and vital... little scratch is an absolute gift' Naoise Dolan

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 08/10/2020

Watson experiments with line breaks, repetition, and columns to express the unnamed narrator’s frenetic consciousness over a single day in this inventive, immersive debut. The narrator wakes with memories of an uncomfortable sexual encounter, after dreaming about it from an out-of-body perspective. Meanwhile, she registers a persistent itch that causes her to scratch herself raw (“blood under my nails from fucking scratching in my sleep”). As the novel progresses through the narrator’s routine and commute to her unsatisfying job at a London news agency (“got to do this thing again, the waking up thing, the day thing, the work thing”), she struggles to resist scratching her arms and legs. Competing thoughts often run parallel in two columns, with intensity indicated in all caps and dialogue in italics. Watson’s clever convention and set pieces are not simply flourishes but integral to the plot and themes. There’s much relatable humor in the heroine’s everyday snafus, such as her struggle for coherence while speaking with a male colleague, and a tedious task with a glue stick, the low point of her workday. The tone shifts as the narrator begins to consider that she was raped, and the last third of the novel becomes genuinely harrowing and unsettling. Watson’s haunting, virtuosic performance is well worth a look. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

"Reading little scratch has broken my heart and opened my mind. It is a daring display of experience that persists and persists and never loses its light." —Jenny Slate, New York Times bestselling author of Little Weirds

"Technology is affecting the way we think, and Rebecca Watson’s little scratch is a novel that captures this. . . Watson lets the words flow, jumbled and urgent as our thoughts are, like Kerouac and his scrolls . . .This isn’t a long book; that’s part of how the author is able to pull it off. . .But it charms. The book’s unconventional strategy fell away as I read; I cared about the narrator as one does a well-drawn character. She scratches at her skin throughout the book, and eventually I felt it."—The New Republic

"Watson depicts her protagonist’s consciousness by way of striking formal structures, using typographical tricks to illustrate the cacophonous complexity of inner life. . . While this could be distracting, or even indulgent, in lesser hands, Watson’s experiments serve to both deepen our immersion and reify the buried pain at the novel’s center. . . little scratch absorbs the more fragmented forms of attention and makes of them something rich, assured and sad."—New York Times Book Review

"[The protagonist is] funny and relatable . . . [T]he writing is economical. It’s a quick read. It takes a regular day and renders it irregularly, interestingly. It presents grief, violence, self-harm and self-doubt in an unusual fashion, driving home just how disorienting and destabilizing these forces can be. It is of the #MeToo era, tackling both catcallers and unrepentant predators, but exists on a plane all its own."—Washington Post

"[little scratch] is a powerful debut from Financial Times journalist Watson, making her one of the year's best new writers to watch."—Bustle

“I was immediately enveloped in the staccato of little scratch, which spun between wry, funny and heartbreaking. It captures beautifully a rhythm not just of trauma, but also of the small, defiant, everyday happinesses that push through and against it.” —Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure and Blue Ticket
 
"Rebecca Watson's little scratch is an immersive experience, an exhilarating plunge into the mundanity and the horror and the mundane horror of a day in a life that is not quite right. It's experimental in the best sense of the word: Watson bends form to accommodate a narrator who wants desperately to communicate but cannot quite bring herself to speak."—Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation

"An inventive, immersive debut... Watson’s clever convention and set pieces are not simply flourishes but integral to the plot and themes... A haunting, virtuosic performance."—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review*

"One of the most captivating books of the year...A revolutionary #MeToo tale focusing less on the act of trauma than the impossible task of healing, little scratch is a challenging work of experimental fiction."—Shelf Awareness

"Formally daring and unique, the novel’s structure mirrors the ways the woman’s mind jumps from mundane moments to the life-changing ones."—The Millions

"The unnamed narrator of this debut novel is an Everywoman...The physical form of the narrative reproduces the experience of the woman's scattered thoughts... which overlap, interrupt each other, merge, and battle in the saturated “now” of the book’s overwhelming immediacy. The result is an unusual reading experience which relates both the mundane and the revelatory...A daring book whose innovations are balanced by the sad familiarity of its pain."—Kirkus Review

"Witty, defiant, tender… what a book!"—Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy and Exposure

"Reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion... daring and completely readable."—Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins

"Rebecca Watson's little scratch voraciously captures our life... Watson uses language with a sniper's precision to target and capture the million little re-calibrations of the self that a young woman has to undertake in order to go from one day to the next. . . It is a story that is urgent. It is a story that needs to be told."—Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You

"Confident and vital. . . little scratch is an absolute gift."—Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times

Kirkus Reviews

2020-05-18
An ordinary day in an ordinary life rendered thought by thought.

The unnamed narrator of this debut novel is an Everywoman: She wakes up a little hungover; she hurries to be on time for a soul-crushing job; she scrolls through her Twitter feed with compulsive frequency; she loves but does not quite trust her boyfriend; she has recently been raped. At first the reality of this unsettlingly commonplace assault is cloaked in our narrator’s more long-standing anxieties, which take the form of intrusive thoughts literally intruding on the page from the right-hand margin. As a way of representing the cacophony of the character’s perceptions, British author Watson has created an unusual layout for her words, using not only the traditional left-hand justification but also right-hand justification and centered text as well as lots of negative space, different font sizes, and other typographical pyrotechnics. The physical form of the narrative reproduces the experience of the woman's scattered thoughts, sensory responses, invasive memories, fears, hopes, untrammeled bodily uprisings, text messages, and internet browsing history, which overlap, interrupt each other, merge, and battle in the saturated “now” of the book’s overwhelming immediacy. The result is an unusual reading experience which relates both the mundane (every drip of the narrator's morning shower, every step of her commute) and the revelatory (“When I write a diary…it was always there—the other—the performance of writing! I write thinking someone is looking in, translate my thoughts into something a little prettier, more heightened than my actual head…as if the diary isn’t even for me”). As the day wears on in a series of tea breaks and bathroom trips, the narrator’s efforts to mitigate the damage of her assault, her deep desire to return to a sense of normalcy, and her struggle to tell her boyfriend what it is that happened to her underscore the outrages of the everyday—a dissonant now that cannot be silenced or slowed.

A daring book whose innovations are balanced by the sad familiarity of its pain.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177066042
Publisher:	W. F. Howes Ltd
Publication date:	01/14/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

look at me now lost in linearity, where is the freedom in my head, to not have to only move side to side, stuck in straight lines every morning once I’ve arrived in this office, breaking myself in every morning, having to loosen the numbness punch by punch

but yes I can feel my head loosening, freeing, it’s always this way, numbness ebbs, visits, interrupts, but always pushed down eventually taking my head away, but always giving it back (or do I wrench it back? I am not sure but I am tired certainly, so I might have been wrenching), takes a while to unstick, colleague passing, who always makes tea for the assistant in the corner, who, I wonder, perhaps knows everything, it seems so, in her soft look, her incessant tea and the no questions, no questions, apart from tea, and sometimes

noting things that she likes, today   my shoes her, nice shoes!
patent t-bars that I rather like myself me, aw, thank you!
(obviously) they’re from Tesco but don’t tell anyone

her, your secret’s safe with me

and she’s away, me still not even sure what she does, her name beginning with R, likely Rachel although that doesn’t sound right,

someone called her over once after she left my desk (she was probably pausing to offer me tea or compliment my dress), and I remember thinking I MUST REMEMBER HER NAME but all that’s left now is the R

I would conclude that she’s imagined, except I imagine that if I were to imagine people they’d make less small talk, do something more radical, incite Gregorian chant, my subconscious trying to find an escape route, a way to be sent out of this place for good (and a chant filling the newsroom might do the trick), I don’t think I’d imagine someone nice, I’d know I was imagining it straight away,

nah I don’t buy it,

I’d tell my imagined colleague,

just not a believable character I’m afraid, the critics would slate you ignoring, admittedly, the fact that she does exist, her and the flecked auburn falling across her back, the white of her eyes even whiter than her skin

(her paleness not a weakness, not prone to illness, just pale),

I’m still in my argument (with myself inside my head) ignoring the fact that all of that exists, all of her exists, those eyes that hair those soft looks that seem to say I know I know I know, all exist and thus she is believable, is real even, but yes, after all, often those that are real are the ones that, when imagined up, don’t quite fit, don’t quite work

and she is gone now after all

shoes still on my feet

her gone

wondering the difference between a woman saying nice shoes

a woman I do not know very well at all no and a man

I do not know very well at all saying nice shoes
I guess if a man says a certain sort of man that is, I can’t say for sure,
can’t tell you how to know, just that you’ll know when you know, that it’s that sort of man, yes,

when that sort of man says  nice shoes

he is not saying nice shoes he is saying I am itemising you

he is saying, take yourself out of that head and put your eyes in my sockets

because hello I am itemising you

like yesterday

that man rapping the side of his stand

selling caramel nuts me sitting nearby propped on the side by the river ten minutes before I needed to go back to my desk reading and then him, suddenly, rapping the side, rap rap rap, me head down ignoring, him rapping the side, me looking up and beaming at me, nothing more, just wanting to grin, to show his presence when I was finally for a moment not present anywhere

what are those moments called? some would call them niceties I guess but I just hear the knock against the side of his stand with his fist (clenched), needing me to notice, to be interrupted, to give the attention I was so set on giving elsewhere

I know if I told this anecdote I’d stress the nuance, if I were to tell my him about it, as I often end up doing, telling that is (although not other things but this digression is not something I am going into), I’d embellish, I’d say !HE LOOKED ME UP AND DOWN!, or !he said PHWOAR LIKE A BIT OF THAT!, adding any detail to support my side so there is no chance he’d doubt, no chance he’d say, Well what’s wrong with a man wanting to smile at you on a sunny day? the answer is obviously a lot A LOT IS WRONG WITH THAT but I don’t have the words I can’t unpick

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