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The bullying Wix experienced at school as a teenager and carried forward the effects of into adulthood sparked a painful sympathy in me. And after through all Wix’s travails, and all the battering her mental health has taken through them, there’s ultimately a cautiously optimistic message in Delicacy: that in the end, she coped with the worst that life could throw at her. Wix’s relationship with her dad pivoted after they were in a serious car accident together that almost killed them.Katy Wix thinks cakes are ‘weird, camp objects’ that ‘represent everything that is false and cloying’. If I could just make my body smaller, firmer, then I would be protected from things like this happening again. Print edition of BTO British Trust for Ornithology News landed today - winter edition containing a marvellous review by Lesley Hindley of our book by Jasmine Donahaye: Birdsplaining: A Natural History. I listened to Delicacy on audiobook, even though I’d been particularly attracted to the picture of a Victoria sponge slice on the physical copy and by the way the words were laid out in short snippets on the page.

She turns her pain into poetry: intimate, candid, exquisitely described, deftly using words rich with grace, pain and power. It centres around grief and Katy connects each of her 21 moments to memories that also include cake. I struggled to find the humour and although elements of it felt very raw and real, there wasn't enough of that or the dark humour for a whole book.The book illustrates how grief changes you as a person, highlighting who you were before your loss and consequently who you become. Written following the tragic and successive deaths of her best friend and mother and father, Delicacy offers a poignant, literary reflection on a collection of issues spanning grief, depression and body image.

Yet, after the accident, it is not just the communication of their father-daughter relationship which improves, but Wix’s own understanding of intimacy. Wix has a difficult journey through grief that made me reflect on how much I’ve forgotten about my own grief for my mum and how at unexpected times grief reappears. When they commissioned it, I think they thought, ‘Oh, you’re a comedian’, that it would be a fun romp. Each chapter of Delicacy is named for a cake, not in a twee way nor even an arch Nora Ephron way, but as a marker of trauma.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. Young women were supposed to be desired and pretty, not moon-faced and depressed, pretend-eating pasta with their mums. 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. Katy has a beautifully poetic way with words, her melancholy and humour are juxtaposed as well as being one and the same.