Little Scratch

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The authorial figure in the book is actually telegraphed for those that read it properly. She is “R” (naturally!) Scratching as a bodily reaction to her environment, and a not very healthy relationship with food, are signals that far from all is well, and her assistant job at a newspaper features and abusive boss. However far from gloomy or heavy, Rebecca Watson brings a lot of humor in the book. The audiobook read by her is very well done, you feel the mood of the narrator shift and change and can really feel a part of her rambling, ever active mind. Words are sent rippling up and down the line of actors, overlapping, chiming or bringing chilled silence.' me softening, him softening, me not needing this, him not needing this, unable to still him how I used to but still, him softening, head tight my head tight tight tight tight why always this when I need it least, if I told him I was raped would he dismiss it? shrug his shoulders say good for you I know he would not be like that really really (and yet my head says he would) (well why don’t I try it then hey) little scratch brings us into a day in the life of a woman making her way in the workforce of London, dealing with sexual harassment and her own thoughts.

I just finished little scratch, which I should have finished the same day I started it, but I found my interest starting to lag half way through. I think it was a smart, interesting style, but for me, if it had been shorter it would have been more impactful.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 If I didn’t have the audiobook there is no way I would have the attention span or energy to decode the entire book. 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 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.

Mitchell’s usual sound designer Melanie Wilson is on hand to add atmospheric flourishes, notably an injection of ambient dread at the right moments and a few swish surround sound effects.' when I write a diary (when I did) or notes (which has not been for a long time yes great I know) (no not since, nothing since) but when I did, it was always there – the other – the performance of writing! I write thinking someone is looking in, translate my thoughts into something a little prettier, more heightened than my actual head, context handily supplied ………. This version of the day-in-a-life book, directed by Katie Mitchell, achieves the same lingering power using a quartet of actors'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. T he staging finds its own careful balance of airy exuberance and intense anger, and it carries the same lingering power.' A superb staging, this version of the dazzling book achieves the same lingering power using a quartet of actors’ The Guardian Besides hilarious passages right from ordinary live we also get to see how whatsapp forms the main platform for the main character to fret over her relationship with her Him.

If a man says a certain sort of man that is says nice shoes he is not saying nice shoes he is saying I am itemising you” (54) It is interesting to use columns to structure parallel events, so one column to quote e.g. reading of texts on the commute while another is the inner commentary on them but the book doesn't escape its own textuality. At times, this feels like an almost send-up of Woolf mashed up with Plath.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. 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.

The experimental comes gloriously to life, with a performance that has an element of music about it’ The Times Overall I thought this was an excellent book treating an important if difficult subject –#MeToo and sexual assault in the workplace. But it wasn’t just that. After all, it’s a long-held tradition that women are given less artistic credit: they are assumed to be writing confessionally, channelling their experience for therapeutic gain. The ordinary kindness of a distant colleague bringing a cup of tea to the protagonist’s desk when she can tell the other woman is tense, and the protagonist’s thought that, if she (a woman whose name she doesn’t even remember) can notice the change, how is it possible that her own rapist cannot see or be moved by what he has done? That ruined me. Recently, commenting on young England star Lauren James’s performance in a match, footballer Gemma Davison described it as “like going to the theatre”. So the comparisons continue. When football is played gorgeously, when our players do something inspired, we reach for the beyond to capture what we have just experienced, to assert that we have witnessed something more than just the simple formula in front of us. When we say football is like theatre, really, we are saying that there is something disguised within the game; something beyond itself. We are describing a live-ness: not the fact of being alive, but the thrill that sometimes being alive is unbelievable.Having written a piece several years ago that mentioned my own experience of sexual assault, inevitably that becomes a lead for interviewers. It helps justify the conclusion that the novel is confessional. That disturbs me. It helps justify bringing up the topic, and pushing me for more. That disturbs me too. Anything I say now adds to the mound – it’s extra context, to help understand my intentions, even if I explicitly say: there is no connection here. Among the administrative tasks, cost centre codes and cups of tea are conscious constants: the memory of her rape, the urge to self-harm, and the comfort of – and desire for – her boyfriend, “my him”. She rehearses telling him about her trauma but fears it would engulf their relationship. Her creativity, too, has been silenced as she cannot continue writing her novel, bringing underlying sadness to the bursts of witty wordplay in her thoughts. 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: Watson has now extended her story to run throughout a single day, from the moment the narrator wakes, groggy, mildly hungover, late for work, until the moment she surrenders herself to sleep. Nothing truly exceptional happens to her – she commutes into central London, waits out the hours at work and then meets her boyfriend for a Friday night out – and yet every moment feels filled with life and with jeopardy. 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 .