Rebecca Watson: ‘There’s a simpler way to tell the story. But it would feel less honest to me’

I meet Rebecca Watson on a muggy Monday morning at the Bindery, the swish art deco home of Faber, her UK publisher. A subdued hay-hangover vibe in the open-plan office is animated by Watson’s glee at unboxing the final copies of her new novel, I Will Crash. “It feels surreal,” she says as she opens the handsome hardback with black endpages for the first time, turning it over in her hand to admire the spine.

The novel follows her debut book little scratch, released by Faber in 2020. It was also staged in an adaptation directed by Katie Mitchell at London’s Hampstead Theatre and then the New Diorama. A stream-of-consciousness day-in-the-life – a modern Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway – little scratch upended the conventions of format on the page to render the cacophony of the mind on the page. Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, it was highly acclaimed by critics: the New Yorker called it an “extraordinary debut”. Many readers reached out to Watson to say “you’ve written my head, how did you do that?”, she tells me. “It says something about how if you’re tuning into interiority, so much of it is shared.”

I Will Crash is no sophomore slump for the 29-year-old Watson. The book continues to play with layout to convey consciousness but spans a longer stretch of time. It covers five days in the life of a young woman Rosa, following the death of her estranged brother in an accident. While little scratch propels the reader with what Watson refers to as “nonstop present time”, I Will Crash extends the ambition by looping in the past as Rosa tries to make sense of their fraught history.

[ little scratch: Intense, visceral novel pushes the boundaries ]

Watson grew up in a tiny town in the South Downs with a twin brother and two older brothers. “Siblings are our first witnesses to some kind of affirmation of who we are,” she says. The relationships are so formative and yet “surprisingly uncovered” in fiction. She is intrigued by the different narratives that parents and siblings develop about the same events – a phenomenon all the stranger as a twin, when “you’re growing up through both the household and through life at the same time”. For the purposes of publicity for I Will Crash, however, “it would be easier to be an only child,” she says, given the risks of conflation of first-person narration, particularly for woman authors.

Michael McGrath: ‘Nothing is ever as it seems. We’ve ended up with seven children, but we had loss along the way’

---

A week in Center Parcs in Longford: Standing in the forest, you feel the money draining gently out of your bank account

---

Paul Howard: I never loved an animal as much as I loved Humphrey. For 13 and a half years, he was my constant companion

---

Watson read English at Oxford, where she began writing a novel “consigned to the bin” in her final year. She had previously experimented with poetry as a teenager. “Nothing that survived,” she laughs, but she recognises the seeds of her fiction in those fragments in which she was “just playing around ... trying to distil how [she] felt in a moment”. A sense of play pervades I Will Crash, despite tackling serious subject matters: grief and guilt, rape and shame, abuse and abandonment.

The distinctive format first came to Watson in an aha moment at the office of the Financial Times, where she works as an assistant arts editor, when a colleague asked her what she’d been reading. The multiple strands of thought during this everyday encounter inspired her to try to capture it in her notebook, which is peppered with little ink drawings. “How could I reorder the information so that as a reader, you’re absorbing the world in the same way that you actually absorb your periphery, your perspectives?” she wondered. She continues to write longhand in a Moleskine–” softcover, so you get a double spread easily”. The paper is unlined, allowing Watson to “dance around” on the page without being hemmed in.

Although she tweaks and reorders when entering the text into her computer (she doesn’t write chronologically), the layout largely stays the same. “The left- and right-hand side of the pages have different sensory and psychological significance,” Watson says, opening I Will Crash at random to show me an example. “But I didn’t start with a rule book. It’s intuitive. I just know where things belong.” Far from being gimmicky or alienating, the innovative form draws the eye in and feels authentic. “There’s a simpler way to tell the story,” Watson says. “But it would feel less honest to me. When I’m writing narrative, I’m more likely to take it apart and then retell it rather than ... tell my story from beginning to end.”

We carve into these really strong narratives [about] what we’ve lived through that act as a kind of scaffolding

—  Rebecca Watson

The concurrence of not only various thoughts but emotions in Watson’s work feels true to life, and is a refreshing antidote to the ubiquity of what the critic Parul Sehgal has called the trauma plot, in which characters are identified with their victimhood. While little scratch shows its protagonist struggling in the aftermath of a sexual assault, it resists trauma as the sole narrative. Watson believes that the art of its success was due to the subject matter “and because of how intensely tied in the form is to the subject, which to me is the whole point: they’re meant to be inextricable”. In I Will Crash, while it’s the physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her brother that is foregrounded, Rosa has also been raped in the past. In a nod to sexual violence affecting so many women, Rosa compares the moment she and another friend had shared their histories to “playing Snap / if half the cards were the same”.

If little scratch dealt with the unknowability of the other, I Will Crash tackles the unknowability of ourselves. “We carve into these really strong narratives [about] what we’ve lived through that act as a kind of scaffolding”, Watson says. “But I don’t believe that the scaffolding is that strong. All of it is kind of conjured to keep us here to keep us solid.” With I Will Crash, she set out to explore “what would happen if someone stopped believing in the stories that they’d told themselves?” Rosa grapples not only with the memories of her brother, but of her parents and childhood friend, Alice. The novel subverts expectations by having the mother, rather than the father, leave the family home when they are children. “It’s not a story that’s commonly told in that way, so how is [Rosa] meant to understand it?” Watson asks.

The brother in I Will Crash remains unnamed. While it’s a common enough feature of contemporary fiction, as Rosa herself is named, I ask Watson about the decision. “It spoke to the evasion and euphemism with which he is spoken about and Rosa’s reluctance to look directly at him (like a too bright light source) – but simultaneously it gives an intimacy too,” she explains. “Plus, given so much of Rosa’s time is spent lapsing into what people’s ‘roles’ are and interrogating what it is to have a brother, it made sense to me that ‘my brother’ would be how she would mentally refer to him.”

Now that the brother is gone, Rosa’s reclamation of their shared narrative is all that she has in her control. The book’s title suggests her “turning powerlessness into power”, says Watson. One of the memories at the core of I Will Crash is an incident in which Rosa is in the passenger seat while her brother is driving when he threatens to crash the car if she doesn’t give him Alice’s number. The title, then, is “a statement of intent, a confession, a threat and a fear. It partly speaks to a memory she cannot keep under her thumb ... and expresses a belated willingness for Rosa to look into the darkness.”

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that to tell their stories, women writers would have to throw off the shackles of inherited Victorian structures to reinvent the novel. It seems that Watson has felt these constraints intuitively: “There’s this kind of tension between how I felt the internal world works and how we have to abide by the structure of the page,” she explains. Even the building block of the sentence itself was no longer suited, Woolf suggested. Watson is too humble to accept my cry of victory that she has accomplished the task that Woolf set out nearly a century ago, but her work certainly seems to have exploded the sentence and the sequence to me.

It’s fitting that Watson and I are at the site of an old bindery for her live unboxing [and all our talk of pushing the boundaries of the book]. I walk out into the streets of the burgeoning neighbourhood of Farringdon, proudly flaunting the first signed copy of I Will Crash.