I encountered Rebecca Watson on a sticky Monday morning at the Bindery, which is the chic art deco headquarters of Faber, her UK publisher. The otherwise quiet open-plan office hums to life with Watson’s excitement as she unboxes the final copies of her latest novel, I Will Crash. “It’s such an unreal experience,” she comments, handling the smart hardback with black endpapers for the first time, inspecting and revelling in its looks.
The narrative follows Watson’s first book little scratch, which was put out by Faber in 2020. There was also a stage version of her debut, led by Katie Mitchell at the Hampstead Theatre in London, and subsequently at the New Diorama. Delivering a stream-of-consciousness narrative – reminiscent of a contemporary version of Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway – little scratch overturned page formatting norms to depict the mind’s tumultuous landscape. With its shortlisting for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, it received considerable praise from critics; The New Yorker cited it as an “extraordinary debut.” Numerous readers got in touch with Watson, expressing how she had managed to write what went on in their minds. “This just shows that there is a deep sense of shared experience when one delves into interiority”, she reflects on these reactions.
I Will Crash demonstrates that Watson, at 29, isn’t experiencing a second-book slump. The novel not only continues her experimentation with layout to express consciousness, but it also extends over a wider timeframe. It explores a five-day period in the life of a young woman named Rosa who is struggling with the sudden loss of her estranged brother in an accident. While little scratch drives the reader with its persistently ‘current moment’ narrative, I Will Crash enlarges the scope by bringing the past into play as Rosa attempts to comprehend their complicated shared past.
[ little scratch: A potent, raw novel that expands literary limits ]
Growing up in a small Southern Downs village, Watson was the sister to a twin and two elder brothers. Her perspective is that our siblings are our earliest audience for our identity. She finds it intriguing how familial relationships, despite their formative influence, often remain unexplored in fiction. Watson is particularly fascinated by the varying stories that siblings and parents create about common experiences, a curiosity intensified by her own experience of growing up as a twin. Preparing publicity for her book, ‘I Will Crash’, she did however, express a wish that she was an only child to circumvent possible confusion with the first-person narration, a common issue amongst female authors.
Watson attended Oxford for her English studies where she embarked on writing a novel only to discard it in her last year. In her teenage years, she indulged in poetry, something that she now sees as the beginnings of her fictional writing style- a mixture of experiments and reflections of emotions in a moment. Watson’s work ‘I Will Crash’ embodies a playful tone notwithstanding the gravity of its themes: trauma and culpability, violation and humiliation, abuse, and desertion.
The idea for this unique format was born during a mundane interaction in the Financial Times office, where she serves as an assistant arts editor. A casual conversation about her recent reads triggered a chain of thoughts, and she was inspired to chronicle it in her journal, a sketchbook of sorts, filled with tiny ink drawings. Her motivation was to rearrange the narrative such that readers comprehend the world in the same way they process their surroundings and viewpoints. Optimising the benefits of a Moleskine’s softcover, she continues to pen her thoughts traditionally; the blank sheets facilitating her ability to freely ‘dance’ across the page.
Despite the unconventional narrative structure that Rebecca Watson employs when transcribing her works into her computer system (rather than writing sequentially), she maintains consistency in her layout. Watson explains the specific psychological implications of the left and right side of pages, citing an impromptu example from I Will Crash. However, she didn’t establish a predefined rule book and mostly relied on her instincts for proper placement. Contrary to being superficial or estranging, her inventive arrangement effectively attracts the reader and exudes genuineness. She contends that a traditional narrative would seem less truthful to her; consequently, she deconstructs and revises it instead of writing it straightforwardly. “We construct potent narratives about our lived experiences which serve as underlying support,” says Watson.
Watson’s work is characterised by its simultaneous presentation of diverse thoughts and emotions, which accurately reflect reality. This style provides a refreshing contrast to the obsessive fixation on victimhood common in narratives, an aspect that critic Parul Sehgal has dubbed the trauma plot. While little scratch portrays a central character dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault, it refrains from making trauma the primary narrative. Watson attributes the success of the novel to the content and the form’s inseparability from the subject matter, which she views as integral. In I Will Crash, not only is Rosa dealing with the physical and emotional trauma of her brother’s abuse, but she has also been a victim of rape in the past. Rosa’s comparison of the moment she shared her history with a friend to a game of Snap, “where half the deck is identical,” highlights the horrifying ubiquity of sexual violence.
The enigma of self-awareness is examined in “I Will Crash”, following on from the exploration of understanding others in “Little Scratch”. Watson explains how we construct robust narratives from our lived experiences which act as a form of support structure. However, Watson queries the strength of these narratives, suggesting that they’re purposefully conceived to maintain our existence and solidity. With “I Will Crash”, Watson endeavours to probe what might transpire should an individual lose faith in the stories they’ve narrated to themselves. Rosa, the protagonist, doesn’t only have to wrestle with her brother’s memories but also those related to her parents and childhood friend, Alice. The novel challenges traditional expectations, presenting a scenario where the mother absconds the family home during their childhood, an infrequently depicted narrative, leaving Rosa perplexed.
Throughout “I Will Crash”, Rosa’s brother remains nameless. Considering contemporary fiction often does so, and Rosa has a designated name, Watson justifies this choice. She articulates that it reflects the reluctance of Rosa to face him directly, much like staring directly into an excessively bright light whilst allowing for a sense of closeness. Considering Rosa frequently ponders on individuals’ responsibilities and what it implies to have a sibling, Watson felt it was fitting for Rosa to mentally address him as ‘my brother’.
With the absence of her brother, regaining control over their shared narrative becomes Rosa’s sole possession. Watson interprets the title of the book as Rosa’s transition from vulnerability to empowerment. A pivotal memory in “I Will Crash” centres on an episode where Rosa is in the passenger seat. Her brother, who is driving, threatens to crash the car unless Rosa discloses Alice’s number. Thus, the title symbolises intent, admission, threat, and anxiety. It partially indicates a haunting memory which Rosa struggles to suppress and exhibits Rosa’s delayed readiness to confront her inner demons.
In her piece, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf posited that in order to share their narratives, female authors needed to shake off the inherited confinements of Victorian structural norms to reshape the novelistic form. It appears that Watson has intuitively experienced these restraints: “There’s a sort of strain between my understanding of the internal cosmos and the need to conform to the page’s construction,” she elucidates. Woolf even hinted that the fundamental structure at the sentence level no longer fitted the purpose. Watson modestly declined my exclamation of triumph that she had fulfilled the goal that Woolf had begun to outline nearly a hundred years ago, yet her work seems to have pushed the boundaries of sentence structure and sequence to my understanding.
How appropriate it is that Watson and I are conversing at the location of an old bookbinding studio, with all our discussions around challenging the limits of the written form. As I leave, I stride down the lanes of the rapidly developing district of Farringdon, openly brandishing the solemnly autographed first edition of I Will Crash.