Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

Product Information

A comedian writing about cake might sound twee, or evoke the sort of defiant hedonism that defines much of Jo Brand’s work. More directly, the subtitle of Katy Wix’s first non-fiction book echoes one of Eddie Izzard’s more famously meandering flights of fancy.

Katy sees the world like no one else and deciphers it with extraordinary beauty. Delicacy took my breath away' - Lolly Adefope

Recent Books

It was like I was 75 per cent there. And the other bit of me was thinking, ‘Oh, this will make a good bit for Chapter 10’

She worried that she might have fallen out of love with being funny. “It just felt like lying, really inauthentic. I couldn’t handle how false it felt. I didn’t want to do comedy, I wanted to talk about what was happening to me. I just lost my sense of humour. But comedy brings a lot of people joy. Being silly is still really important and the two sitting side by side is the sign of a healthy person.” Caragh Medlicott: Yeah, it’s weird because we spend our whole lives saying to the people we love “I don’t know what I’d do without you” — but there’s obviously, at some point, a time when we have to figure it out. We started to go on small walks. Dad asked me to forgive him’: Katy Wix. Photograph: Kristina Varaksina/The ObserverI didn’t know the author was a celebrity when I bought this book, so considering writing isn’t her day job this wasn’t bad! Having said that, I have my reservations. Jones, Alice (15 April 2021). "Katy Wix on comedy, cake and death: 'I just wanted to scream at people' ". inews.co.uk . Retrieved 31 December 2022. Katy Wix: Yeah, exactly. And I think that those numbered fragments made sense because I felt like I was outside of normal time. It’s such a cliche, especially when someone dies, to say that time stops, and I don’t think it did stop, exactly, but it changed. I felt outside of other people’s time. Their lives were just carrying on and that becomes an outrageous idea when you’re grieving. Gentle, heartbreaking, laugh out loud funny and poetically told –an intimate memoir that stays with you’

Ultimately, it has strengthened my love for him. He hasn’t taken the friendship with him. I still care about him and I know exactly what he would think about himself dying and me being left behind, with all my half of our private jokes. I’ve absorbed his traits. I eat the foods he liked and use words he liked and say our jokes to myself. And I’ve come up with some new ones for us, too. I’m living for both of us. I have replaced this person with love. And I get to write this love letter to him. Deeply comforting in how relatable it is, hilarious, and moving. I felt like this book was my best friend as soon as I started reading it’I made a note to myself to write a play about a personal trainer who falls in love with his client. The irony is, he falls for the very body he is trying so hard to change. If Anthony Canada could fall in love with a fat person, then maybe his whole universe would change. It would mean walking arm in arm down the road with a body that wasn’t ideal, but he would have to tell the world that this was the body he had fallen in love with, and that maybe what he thought he needed and what he thought love would look like had been wrong all along. There was a film we watched when we were kids featuring the alien puppets Zig and Zag, and I can’t remember why but during the film at regular intervals there was an announcement “this film has nothing, we repeat, nothing to do with toast”. At times reading this book I thought “this chapter has nothing to do with cake”. Sometimes the links were tenuous at best, and sometimes the shorter passages felt like fillers. Insert some kind of cake metaphor here.

If I could just make my body smaller, firmer, then I would be protected from things like this happening again. A thin body conveyed restraint, self-worth, and no one would think to abuse it. I believed thinness was a protection from misuse and harm. Society stands up for the thin body. Sometimes I would stay and watch the Bond film, just to be in the same room as him. But it made being a woman look awful. This glimpse of my future life – where the women were there to move the plot along or be aggressively kissed until they stopped wriggling – frightened me. I remember thinking, “When I grow up, I’ll never have blonde hair or drive a car or be a woman at all. I’ll find a way out and I’ll always be in charge of the TV remote.” The first thing to do was never to get hips. So I started skipping meals. Brimming with graceful, charming writing - this book perfectly encapsulates so many moments we face as girls and women and I only wish I'd read it sooner' - Kiri Pritchard-McLeanAnd Wix had a big enough portion of that. Her best friend and both her parents died within months of each other, the grief triggering a paralysing depression. Before her death, her mother descended into dementia and helplessness, harrowing for Wix to witness and physically and mentally gruelling as she took on the role of carer herself. Deeply comforting in how relatable it is, hilarious, and moving. I felt like this book was my best friend as soon as I started reading it' She started writing in earnest during her mother’s illness, partly as a way of coping, she thinks. “It was like I was 75 per cent there. And the other bit of me was thinking, ‘Oh, this will make a good bit for Chapter 10’, which feels kind of grubby. But writing it down felt like a practical thing to do in all of the chaos and sorrow.” I didn’t feel pressure to give any kind of guide on how to cope with grief. I didn’t even feel particularly pressured to write a positive ending, it just happened. I think because I’ve come from writing comedy I felt so self conscious of the shifts in tone. To have been in comedy for so long, where everything is steeped in irony, to suddenly be so sincere was hard. That’s partly why reading would help me so much because I could see things that were worth saying without joking. The reader ultimately came to the forefront of my mind when I was in the editing process. I’d written everything down and the first version was almost like a journal so then I had to turn it into something more. I was really just aiming to be fair and honest. The language of pain isn’t helpful. The placement of pain, on a scale from one to ten, relies on having been in pain before.