Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Whatever the reason Katy Wix decided to leave the show, it’s clear her character will be hugely missed! When we reached the house with the stone toads, he was out of breath and had to lean on a telegraph pole. I still think like, if you watch someone being very open and raw in a stand-up show, I think that’s so brave, because with the book it’s still a one-sided conversation. I was waiting for the plot twist, where he suddenly reveals he had a plan all along, that the drinking was a way into something else, and a new, reformed person would emerge on the other side of the destruction. Of course, reading helped too, I’d recently encountered prose poetry properly for the first time and it was like a door just opened in my head and I thought, these are like scenes.

To summarise, probably more a slice of “life” -well actually, more death, loss and grief, than a slice of cake. This incident culminates in Wix riding directly into traffic as a “punishment to all who had allowed the cycling to happen”. But I also have a group of readers now, people I trust, and one person in particular who has read many more books than I have and is far smarter than me.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”. I think at the start it was definitely more selfish — I was writing for myself because I enjoy creating and it’s very therapeutic to me. Also, if I’m really honest, I have a short attention span and I really find structure quite intimidating.

I cried on trains, and didn’t try to hide it by wiping away the tears, so they pooled in my neck, making my scarf wet. 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. His dream was to have been an actor or an artist, but these weren’t practical choices for a man from a small Welsh town who left school young.

As she reaches adolescence, and then young adulthood, Wix enters a toxic cycle of starvation and binging. I 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! 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? Ageing; learning; testing, stretching, abusing; consuming, nourishing; connecting and disconnecting; losing and coping - all trying to be simultaneously reflected upon and understood still through these words.

Katy Wix: You know, we recently recorded the audiobook and when we got to that bit it was really weird. 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. It is – in many ways – an experience common to womanhood, the realisation that being a girl, being a woman, is hard; that after your body ceases – as Wix puts it – to be a “neutral zone”, there is an embarking upon a journey of push-and-pull, the denial of sustenance combined with the inevitable craving, and caving, to the numbing power of coveted food. But I wasn’t sure if he meant sorry about not being able to walk any further, or sorry for driving the car that day. He was a tall man, jammed with sadness and mystery, and worked late in a job he didn’t like’: Katy Wix.Finally, I have an idea for a film script set in Wales — I want it to be about female desire and longing. It was a very stressful three years and there were points where I felt like I was having a breakdown simply because it was all on my shoulders.

One day we ourselves would probably be that empty seat, and everyone would just carry on doing sums.Her mother and father both went to drama school and worked as actors before transitioning into careers in, respectively, arts administration and stage management. It was also partly because I felt like something had to come out of the total shit show I’d been through. and it’s because I’m not used to hearing Welsh accents like this, aside from in Gavin and Stacey , I’m not used to hearing it played straight.