Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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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 binge-watched Taskmaster recently and loved how creative Katy was in her series. Then when she had a stand-in for a couple of episodes I was something like intrigued (too nosy/cold) or concerned (too earnest). I’ve always been interested by people’s absence. I remember at school when someone would go to the medical room and then get sent home. I’d be so distracted by their abandoned belongings and the empty seat. 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. One day we ourselves would probably be that empty seat, and everyone would just carry on doing sums. When Katy was missing, I sensed that she was struggling with more than a cold, and it made the laughter in the episode feel hollow. Food was my way of controlling time. Not eating was a way of attempting time travel. Every time I refused food, I was investing in my future self, a better me. Conversely, every time I binged, I was fixed on the past, because bingeing is always a message from a past self about trauma. Not eating is a rebellion against a grown-up body and a grown-up world. If binge-eating could speak, it wouldn’t have a future tense.

McCrum, Kirstie (23 March 2013). "Katy Wix is Wales' newest funny girl". WalesOnline . Retrieved 31 December 2022. 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. 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. Before my friend died I was too shy to write, definitely too shy to write autobiographically, and now I can’t stop. But I’d trade all the words for him’: Katy Wix. Photograph: Roo Lewis/The Observer As for sensitivity, it is something I’ve embraced more. I think I was raised in an atmosphere where you didn’t show people the truth of how you’re feeling. I always felt more that it was my job to make sure other people were feeling okay. Women are raised to put others’ needs before their own. It means it doesn’t feel natural to say, “oh actually I don’t feel good about this”. It takes confidence — so there is strength in that. My mother used to say that being sensitive was just the price you paid for being a creative person and I do think there’s some truth in that — but it’s almost like it can’t be valued unless you can commodify it. I have read some really interesting stuff about the idea of sensitivity being a trait that’s inherited. Some people are wired differently and they might actually just experience the world in a different, more intense way.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. You are thin. But you feel cheated and as though you have been lied to. You aren’t any happier. In fact you hate yourself more because now you are so empty and tired. You don’t have the energy for romance, you don’t feel small enough anyway despite what friends say, and the hunger keeps you adrenalised and awake at night. Being thin means nothing. Your internal experience of who you are hasn’t changed. The women’s mags told you the problem lay within you, not the world, that it wasn’t society that needed to change, it was you. They promised you a day when you would finally get the love you wanted and deserved if you could reach your goal weight. It’s as if you have finished a game of pass-the-parcel that lasted for years, only to find no gift at the centre. A smaller body has little to do with intimacy, joy, pleasure, connection and power. All thinness gives you is a feeling of having a body that doesn’t stand out.

That book is Delicacy, “a memoir about cake and death”, per its subtitle, which reads like a quietly furious howl. 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. It is an extraordinary piece of writing, the apex of which is a bravura list of 82 thoughts about her mother’s death. “57. I think about if I’ll be asked to go on Celebrity Bake Off once this book comes out, the stand-up-to-cancer one,” she writes. “78. I think about all the objects in her room. Her shoes still contain the grooves of her feet.” Katy Wix as Mary, the ghost of a witch-trial victim in the BBC sitcom, Ghosts (Photo: BBC/ Monumental Television/ Steven Peskett) 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.” Her relationship to her body and eating was fraught from an early age. Her grandfather would call her “Piggy”; after her car crash, the first thing he said to her was “well, at least now you’ll lose some weight”. (Later in the book, she recalls how she went to his funeral wearing bright pink and still high from the night before, “because I hated him and myself”). Her mother “hardly ate”. By the time she was 20, Wix was in a cycle of starving, bingeing, purging and self-loathing. When Mum went out to work, she would leave crisps and sandwiches for us. My dad and I would meet in the kitchen once we were both able to stand. We would politely ask each other which flavour crisp the other preferred, or report something funny the dog had done. After a few weeks, we began going on small walks down the road. When we reached the house with the stone toads, he was out of breath and had to lean on a telegraph pole. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying. 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. We talked about how to not get piles when you’re on strong painkillers. And whenever I laughed, my broken sternum filled with pain and he would wince, as if the pain was his, too. We began to talk about what happened. He couldn’t remember anything about the crash and I remembered everything. He told me about who his favourite artists were when he was in his 20s, and how he was worried his mind wasn’t as good since the crash and that he couldn’t remember much about his father any more, who died when he was young. I told him about how difficult I had found life since university. He told me how insecure he was at having left school early without many qualifications. On the final walk, he asked for my forgiveness. It’s a feeling that’ll be familiar to anyone who was labelled sensitive or shy in childhood. The idea that, contrary to notions of child-like freedom and frivolity, by eleven years old Wix had already developed an acute sense of self-awareness, of her perception in the outside world, and the inhibiting perfectionism that so often accompanies that recognition. This incident culminates in Wix riding directly into traffic as a “punishment to all who had allowed the cycling to happen”. Yet, this is not the pivotal experience of this particular holiday. Instead, it is the one for which the chapter is named – ‘The First Cake’ – an event which is preceded by Wix’s statement that: “My mother’s hopes for me were that I would always be happy and thin. My hope for her was that she would never leave me.” In happening to stumble upon a delicious cake in a French cafe with her mother, Wix encounters a formative experience – one that ultimately permeates the entirety of Delicacy: Caragh Medlicott: I always think that prose poetry is closer to the reality of how we experience emotions anyway. We sort of impose a narrative after the fact.Interview Extra – The King is Dead". TV Choice. 24 August 2010. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 12 June 2012. Caragh Medlicott: I watched the YouTube interviews you did to go along with the book and heard you say that reading other people’s memoirs sometimes jogged your own memory, and that reading other people’s stories in general was more enriching than self-help books. 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. […] Does it feel this way to you?” — I wondered, how much did you think about the reader when you were writing? Was there anything you hoped people would take from it? While studying at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Wix entered the Funny Women competition. She met comedian Anna Crilly in the competition and they later performed as a double act.