They moved to Los Angeles after finishing high school, and Brad worked as a garbage truck driver while aspiring to become an actor.

[1] At the urging of his family, he furthered his education, first at Meridian Junior College and then Mississippi State University,[1] where he graduated with a degree in English.

[2] Subsequently, he undertook postgraduate studies at the University of Alabama,[3] obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in writing and American literature.

[3] While at Alabama he published Last Days of the Dog-Men (1996), which had taken him ten years to write and won him the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and The Great Lakes New Writers Award.

[4] Amy Grace Lloyd, writing for The New York Times twenty years later, called it "a near-perfect story collection".

[8] His 2010 collection of short stories Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives received positive reviews in The New York Times[8] and the Boston Phoenix;[9] its stories contained "divorces, miscarriages, an argument that ends in bungled gunplay, a joint-custody visitation, even a touch of incest", and Watson himself considered some of them some of the funniest stuff he'd ever written.

[18] He is praised for his portrayal of Southern issues and problems (racism and segregation being one of the subject matters of Heaven of Mercury), but commented also on stereotypical simplifications of the South in other parts of America:For all the ways [the South] is struggling and, yes, deficient, or failing, flailing, it is also a place full of wonderful people, and possibly one of the most diverse places in the country.

I was at a tea party or the like at a famous university in the early stages of researching Miss Jane, and I asked the host--who was a pediatrician, for goodness sake--if he could speculate on what might have been my great aunt’s condition.