little scratch

June 1, 2020
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.

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Starred review from August 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.