Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Twenty-one snapshots of a life - some staccato, raw and shocking, some expansive, meditative, and profound, underpinned with moments of startling humour that shatter the darkness - all beginning with a single memory. Then everything was quiet and still, except the white powder from the air bags hovering above the dashboard, and an immense heat in my chest. From superyachts to Alan Partridge, The Day Todayto Ghostwatch, Anna from This Life to formative sexual fantasies about prehistoric apes… here’s the Katy Wix Teleprompter interview. The resonance of Delicacy has a universality to it, just as grief is universal – the difference, of course, lies in our own unique experience of it. 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.

The star has also created her own TV comedy show Fat Camp, set in a children’s diet retreat, which she also stars in. Growing up with a mother constantly on a diet, learning to hate your body, awful situations with men and the terribly wrong thinking back then. It was the first time I’d seen adults being silly and coming up with absurd situations that were my sense of humour.

It’s a talent which can allow both a saga about oatcakes and profound reflections on death to peacefully coexist at home in the same text. It was also partly because I felt like something had to come out of the total shit show I’d been through. Before that, comedy on TV would always feel like just something your parents would watch but this really felt like it was for us, for me and my friends. She struggled with always keeping silent and finally found her peace by helping Mary find her voice.

This incident culminates in Wix riding directly into traffic as a “punishment to all who had allowed the cycling to happen”.Written following the tragic and successive deaths of her best friend and mother and father, Delicacy offers a poignant, literary reflection on a collection of issues spanning grief, depression and body image. Also, I think it’s sort of internalised to feel like you’re somehow attention-seeking or just being a burden or something. On the back, in his scribbly, unconfident handwriting, he would say something funny that the dog had done, or tell me he was proud of me. I know exactly what he would think about himself dying and me being left behind, with all my half of our private jokes’: Katy Wix. I wondered when the spinning would end, and I wished I could ask the people watching if I was going to live.

Unusual, yes, but then a lot of people our age cite the fox in the Robin Hood Disney film as their first screen crush.Cakes are weird, camp objects that seem to appear whenever something emotionally devastating is happening to me. The next few months passed by in a haze of opioids in a box room in my parents’ small Welsh cottage. She plays Fergie in royal satire The Windsors, and was among the comedian-contestants in series nine of Taskmaster. Occasionally, between the giggling, a look passed between us and we would see in each other’s eyes that maybe we weren’t happy, but weren’t going to talk about it. It made me think of a quote from Kazuo Ishiguro: “In the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me.