Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Katy Wix: Susie Orbach really made me laugh when I was speaking to her the other day because she said this thing about how she suspects that men think that women enjoy it. Like this, continual dieting, as if it’s just a thing that women do. Like, we haven’t stopped to ask ourselves why we’re doing it or if it’s enjoyable. As if it’s on par with shopping or something. Leaving that diet culture is almost like leaving a cult — except the cult is mainstream. Gentle, heartbreaking, laugh out loud funny and poetically told –an intimate memoir that stays with you’ And 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. Then everything was quiet and still, except the white powder from the air bags hovering above the dashboard, and an immense heat in my chest. We had come to a stop in the middle of a dual carriageway. “I’m dead,” was my first thought. “I’ve died at 25. I had such potential and now I’m dead. I’ll never go on a panel show and I’ll never fall in love. I’ve died.” I looked down at my body. There was no blood, but I could taste some in my mouth. I looked over at my dad. He was slumped in his seat, not moving, eyes closed. I’d remembered from watching Casualty that you should repeat the person’s first name to keep them conscious. So rather than use “Dad”, I began to yell his name to try and wake him. When the paramedics arrived, on hearing this, they asked if he was my partner and then I died for real, of embarrassment. Wix is one of those performers who just makes things funnier, better; she is comic to her core, whether playing bolshy estate agent Carole in Stath Lets Flats or an overblown Fergie in The Windsors. In person, she is droll, self-lacerating, a little surreal. She is aware that this is not the book people might have expected her to write. “When they commissioned it, I think they thought, ‘Oh, you’re a comedian’, that it would be a fun romp.”

In 2007, Wix joined the cast of sitcom Not Going Out as recurring character Daisy and then went on to be a regular from Series 3 until her final appearance in the 2015 Christmas special. [7] In Torchwood: Children of Earth she plays Rhiannon Davies, the sister of Ianto Jones. [8] In 2010, she presented the BBC Three series The King Is Dead. She made guest appearances on the BBC shows Horrible Histories, Outnumbered (2010) and Absolutely Fabulous (2011). Katy is a stunning writer, seamlessly moving between bitingly funny moments and moments that make you violently, cathartically sob at 2am. An absolute belter of a book that stays with you' - Roisin Conaty Caragh Medlicott: I was thinking the other day about those little souvenir magnets you can buy, the kind mums love, where they say stuff like “I’m watching my weight — but it’s not going anywhere!”. It’s a joke, but also it points to the longevity of it — of how it’s taken as given that women are always dieting.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. Bird Island – Radio 4 Sitcom". British Comedy Guide. Archived from the original on 20 September 2017 . Retrieved 19 July 2017. Katy Wix: It’s so interesting, that idea of guilt. In school you’re taught about this very clear world of right and wrong that isn’t really there. But it’s so confusing because no one has to say to girls directly that food is bad but these messages are transmitted — consciously or unconsciously — through our mothers and the people around us. When I interviewed Susie Orbach [author of Fat is a Feminist Issue ] she was saying that in our culture it is almost impossible to be fully healed, but if you’re kind of 80% recovered, that’s a really good place to be. 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’

Caragh Medlicott: I really felt that your voice and style were so clear throughout the book. I always think there is something quite lonely about prose in particular. I wondered how you approached writing it, and how you found the transition from the script writing you’d done previously? I loved this wry melancholy memoir and identified so much. Full of breathtaking intimacy and honesty, ultimately a comfort, this spoonful of wise and funny sugar helps the medicine of maturity go down.’

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Of course it was still lonely at times. 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. It felt like an immense pressure and there was a lot of self-doubt. 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. I feel like that would be my biggest piece of advice to new writers, to find great readers you can trust. I began to type: ‘Of course, I forgive you. It was years ago now. We were only young, we’re very different people now. We were teenagers. Let’s just move on . . .’ As I was writing it, I thought things like, This is so kind of me and, This is the right thing to do and, It feels good to do the right thing and, How nice of her. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t press ‘send’. A few days later, I recounted the whole thing to my therapist during our session and told her what my draft reply had said, waiting at home to be sent. She said, ‘And is that how you feel?’ and I thought for a while, and then I said, ‘No. No, that’s definitely not how I feel,’ and she said, ‘Well, don’t send it then,’ and I thought, What a good therapist. So, that evening, I replied with the truth instead. ‘No, I don’t forgive you,’ I wrote and pressed ‘send’. Cakes are weird, camp objects that seem to appear whenever something emotionally devastating is happening to me. They represent everything that is false and cloying. I resent cakes: their condescending frilliness, the fact that they don't want me to tell the truth. When someone appeared with tea and cake in the middle of a family psychodrama, what they are really saying was: Let's all eat our feelings instead of expressing them" (p.2).