Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF. While she is sitting in the room where her mother is dying of cancer, she thinks about whether she’ll ‘be asked to go on Celebrity Bake Off once this book is out – the stand-up-to-cancer one.

I probably got into it about half way through, when it became more focused on loss and grief and I found this very relatable, resulting in a few tears in the last couple of chapters! She didn't name-drop to 'impress' us with who she has worked alongside, but she also didn't divulge all information, so for example, although she did discuss incidents which had happened to her within her acting life, she wasn't completely lifting the veil and bringing other people into the spotlight. The pressures placed on young women to be something unachievable rather than themselves have always been there, ever since men took the power in society and decided women were mostly decorative trophies and not real people with intelligence and abilities equal to those of men. As a teenager, Wix realised the power she had over men thanks to an encounter with a lecherous adult male who demeaned his wife in public and, after Wix ruined the punchline to his joke just because she could, used his physicality to threaten her.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. Perhaps mourning begins the moment a baby first realises that it is a separate being from its mother. I have to say that I found this refreshing, as the memoir then came across as just a book about her experiences as a human being with feelings, rather than a celebrity baring it all, so to speak.

Bereavement cake, trauma cake, psychological turmoil cake – they’re all solidly constructed in 278 pages of unsweetened prose. The only reason why I gave 4 stars was that, at times, I felt that the sense of time (by this I mean when things were happening in her life) could be a little hazy. One day we ourselves would probably be that empty seat, and everyone would just carry on doing sums. It is after this, and the subsequent years of her father’s slow mental deterioration, that Wix is stricken not only by the “prison” of “anticipatory grief” but the sudden and unexpected death of her best friend “D”.

This might not seem like an engaging premise, but Katy Wix is one of the funniest women in comedy and handles her subject matter well. Katy Wix has the taken me on a journey of self discovery with an open, honest and often hilarious combination of catastrophe and cake! While all writing in a consistent and compelling voice Wix employs different literary techniques for each of the chapters – described by the publisher as ’21 snapshots of a life’. Got this as an audio book and stuck a chapter on to see what to expect, then ended up listening to it for the whole evening and then every minute I could sneak away from what I was supposed to be doing, until it, regrettably, ended.

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”. 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. We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child.

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.

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.It is hard to capture the fullness of Delicacy without falling back on the cheesy descriptors more commonly saved for movie posters (It’ll make you laugh! The last section in particular where Katy summarises the knowledge she has gained about grief was beautifully written and I think may be of real comfort to someone who is currently grieving.