Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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It’s true that those familiar with Wix’s television work might have anticipated a very different book, one reflective of her quick humour and wit, but Delicacy is still darkly – and fabulously – funny. I don’t think it’s the same as saying, ‘they didn’t love me’”, she smiles, pushing her glasses up her nose. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It’s the sort of insight Wix stamps across every page of Delicacy ; introspective, literary and tinged with sadness.

In mesmerising, unforgiving prose, Wix examines her life – from teenage encounters with boys, to conversations with fatphobic TV producers, from family holidays to the car crash that nearly killed her, through grief to something like recovery.

Katy Wix shares moments of trauma from her adolescence and adulthood and explains how cake has become associated in her mind with the awfulness of life. News from Nowhere will not obtain personal information from other organisations, and will not share, pass on or sell personal information that we hold about individuals to anyone else. 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 took me a few attempts to read this as it was almost too intimate, and the closeness to Wix in age/time frame recognitions almost too raw for where I am in life following a wave of personal loss. I love Wix’s beautiful, heart-rending performance as Mary in Ghosts, the pathos of her portrayal of Carole in Stath Lets Flats, the awkward need to be liked layered over deep kindness in her characterisation of Jules in Big Boys, and was delighted by her insouciance on Taskmaster.

This is a defining and terrible moment – it’s clear that D’s death hit Wix like a lightning bolt – yet it seems, somehow, that society is less understanding of prolonged grief when it is for a friend rather than a close family member. The fact this grief is followed by the loss of her father, and the crushing and unanticipated discovery of her mother’s inoperable brain tumour, is incomprehensibly tragic. In Delicacy, she relates how, on one of her first jobs, a sitcom, a producer told her that she was “too in-between… Looks-wise – you either need put on loads of weight or lose loads of weight.They had finally figured out how to never obey their appetites and to always remain hungry, and had, at last, become lovable and fuckable. No, that’s definitely not how I feel,’ and she said, ‘Well, don’t send it then,’ and I thought, What a good therapist. They promised you a day when you would finally get the love you wanted and deserved if you could reach your goal weight.

Katy highlights how this drawn-out process can be extremely painful, knowing that grief is looming just around the corner. 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.Shocking, raw, darkly funny and deeply humane, Katy Wix's exploration of trauma, grief, addiction, love, loss, memory and hope is truly unforgettable.

Oh wow - I saw the title and subtitle, but little had I realised what full on emotion I was going into with this.

Still, the accident had a positive impact on their relationship which – having brushed up against the potential abruptness of death – blossomed into something more tender and communicative. Award-winning Yishai Sarid’s slender, elegantly translated novel grapples with some mighty questions, among them the myriad ways in which the Holocaust might be seen to have shaped Israel’s culture, and the complex existential politics of memorialisation and Holocaust education. Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB. We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child.