One of the most intriguing moments in Little Scratch is when the protagonist reaches into a bathroom bin to retrieve a piece of lined paper with some writing on it. She is baffled by what she reads—“who the fuck wrote it?”—and by the fact that the author of these scribbled notes doesn’t seem at all concerned with making sense, “doesn’t seem to explain or indicate to herself”. She wonders if she could ever write like that, without a thought as to whether anyone else is going to read it: “when I write a diary (when I did) or notes […] I write thinking someone is looking in, translate my thoughts into something a little prettier, more heightened than my actual head, context handily supplied, as if the diary isn’t for me, just for those who find it once I am dead”. All of which reminds me of something I read recently, quoted in Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag, when Sontag wonders whether or not she has done anything wrong by reading her lover’s diary. “No,” she decides. “One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people.”
I keep returning to the question of why it is that women’s writing is always assumed to be autobiographical, diaristic. Rebecca Watson asks this question directly in this book:
“they’re talking about an author ? who has written a novel actually about herself? but is pretending it isn’t herself? I wonder how they know it’s her, when the author hasn’t told them, do they know better than her who is in the book and who isn’t? that said, I already agree, before having read the book, and despite liking autofiction! liking blurred memoir! still thinking, oh stop, stop with the talk about yourself, make something up, anything, anything, escape from yourself, just give me someone else’s sincerity apart from your own, not your own! trauma borrowed from yourself reads sore, feel it in me too much, no distance right now, need distance”
Watson’s novel follows a day in the life of an aspiring writer as she wakes up, goes to work, goes out with her boyfriend, and generally tries to behave normally—all the while tormented by the presence and proximity of her boss, who we discover has raped her.
The first thing you notice about this novel is the layout—words scattered across each page, often with just one word per line. But it isn’t at all distracting—the unorthodox lineation propels you through the book at a rapid pace, turning you into exactly the kind of “furtive” reader that Sontag described. I picked it up and didn’t put it down again until I’d finished it. It’s an extremely successful style that manages to inject some of the protagonist’s nervous energy and trauma into the text itself. The reader is forced to move across, along, and down the page in ways that are not intuitive, sometimes reading two trains of thought simultaneously, and yet it is undeniably an easy book to read. In one scene, as she cycles alongside her boyfriend, the word “pedalling” is repeated in a column down each side of the page, with her frantic thought-process unfolding, squashed, in the middle. It’s beautiful.
The title, Little Scratch, refers at least partly to the protagonist’s compulsive scratching of the skin behind her knees—this mark-making having replaced any other, previous kind of productive work. This is a book about the trauma of rape. But it is also about writing and what it means to do it as a woman. Why does it so often seem like writing about trauma experienced by women is to claim that trauma as your own?
At the pub, the protagonist’s boyfriend asks her “when was the last time you wrote?”, and she repeats a few times throughout the book that her writing, along with her mental health, has been disrupted or put on hold by the assault. We don’t know whether some, if any, of the contents of the novel are drawn from the author’s experience—I guess not, or refuse to linger over that question—either way, the clever move here is writing a first person narrative that doesn’t care if it leaves the reader behind, or doesn’t care if anyone is even reading. It is a text that, like the scrap found in the bin, isn’t written in any recognisable style or language, and is all the more compelling for it: it’s nothing like a diary.
With Little Scratch, Watson highlights the fact that women are so rarely afforded the honour of dying the “death of the author” as proclaimed by Barthes’; for women, the lines between diaristic writing, autofiction, and fiction are blurred. Watson doesn’t shy away from the subject of rape, clearly, but her account of its life-shattering consequences reads as anything but “sore”—instead, this book is exciting, and bold, and unapologetic. It doesn’t allow the reader to roll their eyes, or get bored. It’s urgent and it’s happening and you either keep up or get left behind, the narrative won’t wait.
[February 2021]
t-barnes 