Miriam Battye and Katie Mitchell have turned 24 hours inside a frenzied mind into something like a piece of music' which is why I’m ladling (eyebrows peaking, just a little, at how the soup matches the sides of the takeaway container) Reads like the cinders settling in the air after an explosion… daring and completely readable.’ Colin Barrett

I read Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan over Christmas. It’s really moving. The way he captures the romance of friendship is quite a rare thing. It’s also a beautiful celebration of spontaneous life, which feels really brutal to read during a pandemic. Left to right: Eve Ponsonby, Eleanor Henderson, Morónkẹ́ Akinọlá and Ragevan Asan in Watson’s little scratch at the Hampstead theatre, March 2021. Photograph: Robert Day It would have made a worse book, but I could have. I could have, but crucially, I’m not sure what difference it would have made. People spot all sorts of details that should be unfamiliar. Some people do think it’s me; it was inevitable. It’s about rape, and I have said before [in a 2019 piece in the TLS] that I was raped, but the narrator’s experience is very different to mine; there’s multiple ways that someone can be assaulted, and multiple ways someone can react. I sometimes regret that piece, only because it acts as a springboard in interviews. It always comes up, and I really don’t believe there’s a correlation between it and little scratch, but people try to map the piece onto the novel and interpret it as confessional. This novel was never an act of catharsis. It was a joyful act of creation. This is not just a clear-eyed examination of the outrage of rape and its corrosive aftermath; it is an experiential testament to what it is to move through the male-dominated world as a woman. It’s extraordinary – and indispensable.'

February 2012

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.' 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 whilst in the toilet I tear) face unmoved, (frantically collecting skin under my nails), teeth tight, chin set against my tongue 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. 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.

little scratch is a little miracle… impossible to read it and not wish there were more books like it.’ Alan Trotter Recently, a stranger congratulated me on my book. “I loved it”, she told me, “it was so brave.” I was in the pub and my boyfriend was standing next to me. She asked, quietly by my ear, if that was my partner. I introduced them and she tilted her head towards him, saying, in a tone of hushed awe: “Wow, I feel like I know so much about you.” The thing is the problems such as getting up, the scratchiness etc all stem from the same problem and the book goes into a dark rabbit hole, where we find out that the narrator has undergone a traumatic experience. no sound,) (no big drama in its departure) as a new thought takes its place, the previous clotted, trudging off, breaking its own fall, sifting down the sink, younger self Adapted from Rebecca Watson’s ‘daringly experimental debut’ novel ( Guardian), little scratch is a fearless and exhilarating account of a woman’s consciousness over the course of 24 hours. The charged narrative records in precise detail her impressions of a deceptively ordinary day - the daily commute, office politics and a constant barrage of texts on WhatsApp – and as the day goes on, she gradually starts to unveil the trauma of a rape that is consuming her. Exploring how the human mind internalizes, distracts, and survives the darkest moments, Katie Mitchell, with sound score by Melanie Wilson, brings Miriam Battye’s adaptation to compelling life.On her influences, Watson cited Sarah Kane (playwright); Virginia Woolf; especially Between the Acts ; Eimear McBride; Meena Kandasamy—the link is ‘performative voices’ 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. little scratch made made me work hard, and I'm not sure it has a 'payoff' in a traditional novelistic sense. The language is spiky and fragmentary and the storytelling style approaches its subject--a woman trying to cope with the trauma of sexual abuse--in a manner that mirrors that shattering dislocation.