Little Scratch

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It’s a reaction against the often really messy way we talk about rape and sex. I wanted my protagonist to be able to differentiate them; separating the two is part of her ambition right across the day [over which the book unfolds]. I didn’t want rape to corrupt her sex life or sense of desire. It was an empowering position for her to take, and for me to take, to ensure that joy and desire remain, even though there’s not necessarily any resolution in the novel. ‘It’s a reaction against the messy way we talk about rape and sex’

hurts to bend my legs a bit, can feel behind my knees skin relenting, too stiff to wrap around the bone quite right, tearing, paper not made to flex this way We know she has suffered something traumatic (the title derived from her perpetual scratching, as though wanting to purge herself), but the precise nature of the situation materialises gradually. In the same way as she records her boss’s receipts amid a sea of admin, she feels her body being itemised by men, but longs to be noticed for the right reasons. With clear-eyed precision and pathos, Little Scratch recalls the darkest elements of the #MeToo conversation, the trauma at its heart graphically but poetically recalled with all the brutalism from which the victim is still reeling. The thoughts are a mixture of the prosaic, describing the sights, sounds and feelings of a working day sequentially, and deeper undercurrents which gradually come to dominate the book , as the reasons for the narrator's unease around her book are clarified. My book, I should make clear now, is a novel. little scratch is a fictional day-in-the-life of a young woman (who, yes, has a boyfriend). Told in the first person, the narrator lives in London and works as an assistant full-time in a newspaper office. The reader inhabits her mind as she goes about her day, getting up, going to work, and cycling to the pub – all while attempting to surmount a trauma that she has yet to fully confront. Maybe people who don’t overthink or find themselves distracted by obsessive-compulsive thoughts may find parts of this book jarring, but I found them comforting and illuminating.

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I have to stop myself, I know I will stop myself so my body scratches faster, gets in more moves in less time, if you’re going to make me tear away so soon I better get my pound’s Forest manager Steve Cooper, whose ‘disposition goes against the red-card-manner of managers such as Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola’. Photograph: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images What is striking about Little Scratch is Watson’s ability to connect her character’s inner monologue with her physical existence; she is never less than fully embodied. Her mental meanderings and digressions never feel like abstract exercises in portraying thoughts or testing language. Moments of self-harm or appalled recognition of the trauma that the narrator is living through are refracted through the commonplace experiences of drinking water or walking up a flight of stairs; Watson neatly sketches the alienation from one’s environment that carries over into the body, occasionally making her appear to us like a figure in a game, navigating space, avoiding pitfalls, getting through to the next level.

Rebecca Watson’s novel works magnificently on stage. Miriam Battye and Katie Mitchell have turned 24 hours inside a frenzied mind into something like a piece of music’ Evening Standard In interviews Rebecca Watson talks about the inspiration of Virginia Woolf, and because Little Scratch is a full on stream of consciousness from start to finish, the disjointed layout works well.Blisteringly honest and unflinchingly intimate, little scratch is extraordinary – and indispensable’ The I An image! not my spoon! not my phone! (although I can see that too, an emoji of a pig, which distracts me for a second but oh no I am not letting this go, yes an image, a book Forest playing Everton at the City Ground in Nottingham, 5 March 2023. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images The experimental comes gloriously to life, with a performance that has an element of music about it’ The Times Director Katie Mitchell brilliantly rises to the challenge of adapting Rebecca Watson’s innovative debut novel for the stage'