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. In a lot of the stream-of-consciousness style books I’ve read, especially those following characters similarly dealing with trauma and/or spiralling thoughts, I have felt a coldness and detachment that stops me fully loving the experience. Watson manages to capture wry observations and to communicate the struggles of living in the aftermath of trauma, whilst also bringing so much warmth and hope to her work. 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

Extract, from the original short story, with a nice plug for a book from the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions In interviews it’s like a dance as Watson frequently felt she was being pushed to say that the story was autobiographical. Its not. Some interviews were really uncomfortable as a consequence.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

The text (as my opening and closing quotes show) brings in ideas of linearity in thought and conventionality in writing (for example when the narrator finds some notes discarded by a colleague in the women’s toilet bin). This morning, turning so that my eyes levelled with the bedside table, I saw two things: my phone flashing and spluttering away as the alarm went off, and Rebecca Watson’s novel Little Scratch. These first moments of awakening are captured by Watson in the first line of the novel: “I am traveling through, passing my own capillaries, red lines rushing by.” I decided my phone should have a longer lie-in than me and reached for Watson’s debut novel . The poetry reading awkwardness is hilarious, but the musings around how to deal with rape are a very ample counterweight, brought in a claustrophobic manner, with thoughts like:Blisteringly honest and unflinchingly intimate, Rebecca Watson’s debut novel is astonishing – a moment by moment account of a day in the life of a young woman who has been raped.' While the story starts off rather brilliantly, it fell flat for me in the second half. The text ultimately does not do justice to its weighty themes, nor does it achieve a satisfying balance of the profound to the banal. Much of it feels like a short story, stretched too far (incidentally, parts of the text were previously published in short story format). Another issue – perhaps related to the youth of the author – is that Watson does not fully trust her reader. It feels, at times, like a sermon on #metoo and related topics – intended for readers desperately in need of education. (I personally prefer a lighter hammer.) Bias is too adhesive for denial to do much. But the assumption and the expectation can be unpleasant. During one live radio interview, it increasingly became clear that the presenter wanted me to say that the protagonist’s trauma was my own. They would ask a question and not get the response they wanted, only to try another way. The story originally started life as a prize shortlisted short story – and that story forms the midpoint of the day and is reproduced in full in the novel and gives a good sense of the book – much better than I think I have or can manage. 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.