Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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A stunning book in which darkness and light, tragedy and humour, pain and hope are all masterfully, affectingly balanced. Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB. Although she works in comedy, I found it refreshing that this memoir was in no way a nod to the other celebrities in her life. This quest for truth is felt throughout Delicacy , less in the exactness of its recounting and more in its emotional history – the understanding that our past feelings lay the foundation for the present and how, in relaying them, we might make them processable. The only reason why I gave 4 stars was that, at times, I felt that the sense of time (by this I mean when things were happening in her life) could be a little hazy.

As a teenager, Wix realised the power she had over men thanks to an encounter with a lecherous adult male who demeaned his wife in public and, after Wix ruined the punchline to his joke just because she could, used his physicality to threaten her. Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF. This is what happens, if you’ve been body-shamed from a young age: you lose the ability to feel as though your body is your own. Someone who’s just living a full complex life and falls in love – and it’s nothing to do with their body.

In a letter to her departed friend, identified only by his initial, she notes with a wry darkness: ‘Grief is so strange, D. I have others I can discuss life with, of course – my husband, my best friend, friends with whom I’ve worked for years – but there’s still nobody like my mum was.

The idea that, contrary to notions of child-like freedom and frivolity, by eleven years old Wix had already developed an acute sense of self-awareness, of her perception in the outside world, and the inhibiting perfectionism that so often accompanies that recognition. An absolute belter of a book that stays with you' - Roisin Conaty 'Brilliantly original, funny and insightful. I looked at her and wondered when and how I had somehow got the message that, despite knowing that I was smart, my real goal should be to have someone fall in love with me; that would be the pinnacle of being a girl. Like many women, I don’t know exactly at what point food changed for me – I can remember leaving food on my plate as a child, happy to stop eating when satiated (something that later became unfathomably complicated) – but in reading this passage I felt a deep and resounding recognition.No, that’s definitely not how I feel,’ and she said, ‘Well, don’t send it then,’ and I thought, What a good therapist.

Personally, I felt that the way Katy wrote made me feel that I could relate to her, despite not having gotten to the same stage in my life where I have had to cope with the loss of a significant person from my life. Making my decision over the recent job offer reminded me of how much I miss her, the person I discussed most of my big life decisions with, until the day her awareness of her dementia led her to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you any more. As she reaches adolescence, and then young adulthood, Wix enters a toxic cycle of starvation and binging. In fact -to stretch the cake metaphor even further, like any good cake, this book is layered with many darkly comedic moments and wonderfully witty writing.Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Then when she had a stand-in for a couple of episodes I was something like intrigued (too nosy/cold) or concerned (too earnest). I wonder if the industry has grown kinder in the years since that producer told her she was “too in-between”. We would sort of talk, me gabbling on in the way 10 year olds curious about the world do, but my dad was always disconnected, lost inside his depression and anger at the world for being so incomprehensible to him. You realise that you are probably trying to fulfil your parents’ unrealised creative dreams, and yet she demonstrates to you that womanhood equals martyrdom.

This might not seem like an engaging premise, but Katy Wix is one of the funniest women in comedy and handles her subject matter well. This incident culminates in Wix riding directly into traffic as a “punishment to all who had allowed the cycling to happen”. The last book that you read, or that is read to you, arms you with something to have a conversation about to ensure safe passage. She turns her pain into poetry: intimate, candid, exquisitely described, deftly using words rich with grace, pain and power. The women’s mags told you the problem lay within you, not the world, that it wasn’t society that needed to change, it was you.I didn’t really have any expectations going into this, it was sadder than I’d imagined it would be but I’ve never read grief explained so simply. Where the book excels is in its readiness to court controversy without surrendering nuance, and in place of moralising it offers questioning that’s as necessary as it is unsettling. A few days later, I recounted the whole thing to my therapist during our session and told her what my draft reply had said, waiting at home to be sent. Cakes, to her, are ‘weird, camp objects that seem to appear whenever something emotionally devastating is happening’, sugary totems for her misery.