Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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After university, she went to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and while there she decided to compete in the Funny Women competition, despite never having done comedy before. It’s a quality evidently possessed by Wix and yet, far from a collection of aphorisms, Delicacy toes the line of novelty and novelistic in the way that all good memoirs do; at some points a linear story – and at others a series of vivid, flickering vignettes – its poignant memory of childhood and adolescence, of the formation of body image issues, of grief and familial relationships, are of the kind that send the reader’s own wheels of memory turning.

I’d known Katy as a TV actress, particularly as the ditsy friend in Not Going Out , but not realised sheeple also did stand-up, nor that she was Welsh, so this was quite a revelatory as well as a moving memoir that you’ve reviewed, so thank you.

Print edition of BTO British Trust for Ornithology News landed today - winter edition containing a marvellous review by Lesley Hindley of our book by Jasmine Donahaye: Birdsplaining: A Natural History. I have to say that I found this refreshing, as the memoir then came across as just a book about her experiences as a human being with feelings, rather than a celebrity baring it all, so to speak. I probably got into it about half way through, when it became more focused on loss and grief and I found this very relatable, resulting in a few tears in the last couple of chapters! A stunning book in which darkness and light, tragedy and humour, pain and hope are all masterfully, affectingly balanced. if we are to get anywhere in this world, we must, at some point, learn to sever the ties between applause and self-worth.

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. Cakes are weird, camp objects that seem to appear whenever something emotionally devastating is happening to me. In a letter to her departed friend, identified only by his initial, she notes with a wry darkness: ‘Grief is so strange, D. p>Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notice. However, it is also -and rather unfortunately, a book that would strongly benefit from an extra edit or two, as ultimately it read a little too “all over the (cake?

I’m not usually one for writing in books, it feels forbidden, but I found myself underlining sentences that spoke to me. It centres around grief and Katy connects each of her 21 moments to memories that also include cake.

In Delicacy’s first story, Wix remembers being reluctantly coaxed into cycling while on a family holiday in France, aged eleven. She turns her pain into poetry: intimate, candid, exquisitely described, deftly using words rich with grace, pain and power. What a relief to have found the answer so early in life: I would never be alone again, now I had discovered the magical effect of sugar.Though each of the chapters of Delicacy feature a cake in its title, this – as its subtitle pre-warns – is not just a memoir about food and body issues. When she finally achieves the goal of ‘thinness’ in her early twenties she is appalled to find that “being thin means nothing” – a revelation which means facing up to the perpetually undelivered societal promise that “someone would meet my outrageous needs if I could just memorise a few weight-loss tips”. 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. Those things drew attention to the fact that we’d be carrying on with our days as normal whilst our friend was consumed by their debilitating personal drama, probably throwing up or plagued with toothache or feeling like the world was going to end. Prior to the accident, Wix seemed to feel stumped and somewhat snubbed by the obscurity of her father’s past; “I began to wonder who he was […] there was so much I didn’t know”.

It’s also extremely sad in places as Katy has experienced intense grief (both her parents and her best friend died in quick succession).Because it allows us to be someone else, making it, quite simply, “the finest cultural bargain ever to come your way”. It takes the form of an extended letter written to the chair of the board of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum, by a nameless historian who’s found himself trapped in a career as a tour guide of Holocaust sites in Poland – immersive, horror-filled work that’s quite naturally driven him to a nervous breakdown. Katy highlights how this drawn-out process can be extremely painful, knowing that grief is looming just around the corner. The bullying Wix experienced at school as a teenager and carried forward the effects of into adulthood sparked a painful sympathy in me.