1000 Tiny Birds

Rebecca Watson - Little Scratch (2022)

Rebecca Watson’s debut novel, Little Scratch, is more… textual sculpture than prose? Representing and reflecting a young woman’s interior monologue through one day of work, Little Scratch depicts the contrasts and conflicts, the parallel thinking and realtime reactions to one’s own thoughts through a combination of words and typesetting. Simultaneous thought processes run together, tangled and inextricable. At the heart of it - not to delve too much into plot spoilers - is an understandable trauma and the reaction to that. That is the easy, more objective reading of it, the non-Barthesian take. What does one bring to it otherwise? Their own baggage, of course. It feels a very familiar and insightful view of anxiety and the snowballing as one recognises the processes beginning. The need to scratch in conflict with the need to not. A wish for self-determination in the experiences that define us. Even beyond that, not to overlook that key thematic element, on the lighter side it very neatly depicts the odd dissonance between those quite stark thoughts and the mundanity of the office job, the clockwatching, the habits and routines, the waiting and anticipatory treat of such for a text from “my him” to break up the day and centre herself.