Following the publication of her debut novel Little Scratch in 2021, Rebecca Watson received international attention. The book offered a searing look at trauma, told by a woman over the course of a single day.

Its success led to Watson being chosen as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and as one of the Observer’s 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2021.

Watson’s second novel, I Will Crash, was met with similar acclaim when it was released last year. Taking place in the days after the narrator, Rosa, finds out that her estranged brother has died in a car accident, the narrative incorporates Watson’s now-lauded ‘free-form’ approach. It’s what she calls a “system” of fiction-writing, which involves fragmented, stream-of-consciousness narration, and sudden jumps in the typography.

The unique form takes you into the immediacy and chaos of thought – ideal when you’re writing about trauma and violence – and the style has been compared with the likes of Max Porter, although a closer comparison might be Irish writer Eimear McBride.

And the plaudits keep coming for Watson, with I Will Crash longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. How did the author feel on hearing the news?

“Obviously I was chuffed,” she nods, talking from her home in East London. “Any piece of good news is lovely, but I’m basically trying not to think about it, because it doesn’t have a relationship to my current writing. I have to not think about it, otherwise it almost becomes like the relationship you have with social media, that next-dopamine-hit stuff. I don’t know, there’s a kind of thrill, or attention, that I try to be quite wary about.”

Was there hard labour involved in getting the book written?

“I started writing it quite a while ago,” says Watson. “Basically, as soon as I finished Little Scratch, so it was the spring of 2019. It took four-and-a-half years to write, and five drafts. I was always kind of… I don’t know why, but ‘plodding’ is the verb that feels appropriate to me now.

“At the time of writing, it was slightly more energised. But yeah, it was quite a different experience to writing Little Scratch, which was one draft, one year. The first book just came out: that was the energy burst it needed. Whereas, I Will Crash was slower and needed more thought.”

The novel offers a raw meditation on what it means to approach grief right after a person has died. Over the five days in which the action takes place, the narrator reckons with the death of her brother, the abuse she suffered from him growing up, and the destruction he wrought on the people around him.

POWER DYNAMIC

Tellingly, she voices that all-too-real frustration of not being able to find closure, even in the finality of death.

“I thought death would make all of this possible to recount,” Rosa says. “Yet he’s still caught in motion.”

“I think when I was first setting out to write this novel, I was purely thinking about the relationship between Rosa and her brother,” Rebecca explains. “I guess I wasn’t really thinking that I was writing a grief novel. If I’d thought about it in that way, I would have found it quite intimidating. Because grief is a pretty big subject and the way in which we talk about it is quite intimidating.

“So I was thinking very specifically about Rosa and her brother’s relationships with each other. Then thinking, what would death do to that relationship? So I was seeing death as a point of action, examining what it would do to Rosa for her brother to die, and knowing that it would initiate this kind of unravelling.”

The unravelling is narrated in vivid, fragmented snatches, where the reader gets a glimpse into the fear, shame, silence, and – importantly – doubt that comes from Rosa’s memories of sibling violence. I mention to Rebecca that one of the sad, surprising elements of I Will Crash is how seriously it treats sibling violence, which is often universally dismissed as “just kids fighting.”

“There is something so fizzy and alive about sibling relationships, particularly the idea of your sibling being a co-witness to your life,” Rebecca reflects. “And therefore having a kind of co-share of memories.

This means that all your memories become divided between a group of people – however many siblings you have.

“It’s not a relationship that we really think that much about, maybe because it’s unchosen, it’s kind of automatic – if we have siblings, they’re just there – and so even though these are very complex relationships, our language for, and attitude to, talking about them is remarkably limited.

“We’re quite good at talking about parents and children. We’ve therapised that a bit in the public consciousness, maybe partly because the power dynamic is unambiguous. But the neutrality of siblings adds this uncertainty to the discourse around it, and that has probably been unexplored.”

ARTISTIC CREDIT

Beyond her fiction writing, Rebecca has also written columns for UK newspapers. In an article published in the i in 2022, she documented her experience of being confused with the protagonist of her debut novel, Little Scratch, with many believing that the work was biographical non-fiction.

In the article, she wrote: “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.”

While I Will Crash is clearly fictional, I wonder if, since the protagonist bears notable similarities to Rebecca – she’s a young writer who is asked to pen columns for UK newspapers – the author had any reservations about whether the character might be confused with herself again?

“It’d be counterintuitive to let that obstruct my writing,” she says. “If I came up with an idea for a character who shared a similarity with me and then I had a counter-impulse where I thought, ‘Wait, people might see that and they’ll think it’s me, I better change it’ – that perspective doesn’t belong anywhere in my writing process.

“I don’t care enough about that. All I really care about is what I want to write about, what my instincts are. And I guess when I get to the point when I’m actually publishing the book, then that’s when I have to deal with whatever bed I’ve made for myself.”

• I Will Crash is out now.