Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Katy has one of the most singular and enviable minds working today (and tomorrow)’– Jamie Demetriou, creator of Stath Lets Flats

I paused my never-ending projects of self-improvement (get Michelle Obama arms, read Middlemarch, give up Diet Coke). I couldn’t improve in any way or be productive. I could just survive. When getting out of bed was difficult, I broke things down into threes, to make them manageable: 1) push duvet off; 2) put feet on floor; 3) stand. This was the most I had ever done for my emotional wellbeing and I have my friend to thank for that. When you are the one hurting yourself, you are never safe. It was nice to start to feel safe in my own company again. 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. I also have an idea for another book, a novel, but I am still intimidated by the idea of narrative. At the moment I have three protagonists, with three timelines, so that I can chop it up. We’ll see where it goes. Finally, I have an idea for a film script set in Wales — I want it to be about female desire and longing. From BBC3’s In my Skin written by Kayleigh Llewellyn

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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’. 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

But Delicacy: A Memoir About Cake And Death is a much more profound, complex and tragic book than any of those instant associations could prepare you for. Cakes, to her, are ‘weird, camp objects that seem to appear whenever something emotionally devastating is happening’, sugary totems for her misery. Katy Wix: Yeah, certainly. I think getting a bit older helps. And I guess realising that, actually, what often happens when you tell someone the truth of how you’re feeling, or something you feel is shameful, is that they react in a totally fine way. They say, “that’s fine — I still like you”. But it’s taken a long time. I still find subtle ways to avoid being vulnerable even now, and I catch myself doing it, and it’s interesting noticing when it happens. 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 able to control the level of vulnerability. After one bite, like an alcoholic taking their first sip, I knew I was in trouble. As the sugar hit and my eyes closed in ecstasy, I realised I had found my thing. Here was a cheap, easy and legal way of getting high, any time I wanted, for the rest of my life. What a relief to have found the answer so early in life: I would never be alone again, now I had discovered the magical effect of sugar. You’re never really alone if you’re eating cake. 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).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. 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.

Bird Island – Radio 4 Sitcom". British Comedy Guide. Archived from the original on 20 September 2017 . Retrieved 19 July 2017. Katy sees the world like no one else and deciphers it with extraordinary beauty. Delicacy took my breath away' - Lolly Adefope He came to visit me and hated the tube and only wanted to go to Camden. We sat in the corner of a red pub that only played Oasis. Occasionally, between the giggling, a look passed between us and we would see in each other’s eyes that maybe we weren’t happy, but weren’t going to talk about it. Now, I wish we had. The only thing he said, as we spilled out on to the street, was that he found adult life “boring and uncreative”. Now I eat the foods he liked and use words he liked and say our jokes to myself 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:

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Katy Wix: Yeah it’s like the cognitive dissonance we need to go about our lives. Otherwise we’d all just start screaming. I think before I experienced loss, I didn’t really think about it. And I think that’s kind of correct — I feel like when you’re young you shouldn’t think about it. There’s a friend of my mum’s who I suppose must be in her late 50s who still hasn’t lost anyone. Like she still has her grandparents and she kind of just looks frightened. I think it’s an emotional privilege, in many ways, to go through your 20s and not lose anyone. I have friends who lost a parent when they were really young and I think they just kind of had to park it and deal with it later. 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



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