Heartbreaking, ridiculously clever and laugh out loud funny. One of the best books on trauma I've ever read'

I have often wondered if the last book you read is important. I remember the last book I read to my dad [....] The last book you read before you die is like the type of coin that gets put under your tongue for Charon. It is mental substance for your journey, something to remember as you go on your way" (p.206).

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Instead, she produced a forensic piece of life-writing, which begins with the line, “Let me tell you why I rode my bike into oncoming traffic”. (Aged 11, she swerved into the path of a car on holiday in France because her parents didn’t listen when she said she didn’t want to cycle. She escaped without injury. “I didn’t care what happened to me,” she writes. “I just wanted revenge for being ignored.”)

I didn’t know the author was a celebrity when I bought this book, so considering writing isn’t her day job this wasn’t bad! Having said that, I have my reservations. This is what happens, if you’ve been body-shamed from a young age: you lose the ability to feel as though your body is your own. You muddle your needs with someone else’s very easily, because you don’t think your body is worth defending. And I didn’t know how to articulate any of this to Hip Flask, at 3 a.m. Would he even have listened? In all honesty, I felt too fat to say no. McCrum, Kirstie (23 March 2013). "Katy Wix is Wales' newest funny girl". WalesOnline . Retrieved 31 December 2022. At age 26, Wix was involved in a serious car accident, which has affected her health ever since. [11] Filmography [ edit ] Film [ edit ] Year 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. The pain and vulnerability are palpable in her writing, but the complexities and contradictions of being human come over louder still.A stunning book in which darkness and light, tragedy and humour, pain and hope are all masterfully, affectingly balanced’–Liam Williams

I wonder if we are born with the ability to mourn or if it is something we must learn, and, if so, who teaches us? Perhaps mourning begins the moment a baby first realises that it is a separate being from its mother. Katy Wix: It is and it isn’t — it just happens because it’s the only childhood I’ve known. I started watching the BBC3 series In My Skin recently. It’s set in South Wales and I think that Kayleigh [writer Kayleigh Llewellyn] is really talented. When I was first watching it I thought — “why does this feel weird?” — and it’s because I’m not used to hearing Welsh accents like this, aside from in Gavin and Stacey , I’m not used to hearing it played straight. I was speaking to the comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean the other day, I went on her radio show, and she was saying that the writing in Delicacy felt really Welsh at times. Like it had this sad poetry to it — almost like standing in the rain somewhere in Wales. I like that — I think that’s nice. Brilliantly original, funny and insightful. Dry and comic, but also very moving. I absolutely loved Delicacy' - Katy BrandIn 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. In Delicacy’s first story, Wix remembers being reluctantly coaxed into cycling while on a family holiday in France, aged eleven. Explaining her discomfort, Wix writes: I even kept it hidden from him. When I first moved to London, he stayed in Cardiff, but we would spend hours on the phone most evenings. My flatmate said she always knew when I was talking to him because of the laughter coming from my room. Escapism was a big part of our friendship.

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) 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. From award-winning comedian and writer Katy Wix comes Delicacy– a different kind of memoir from an astonishing new voice. It’s like the way some writers think ‘strong female lead’ means a female character who is capable of violence/revenge, but it takes just as much strength to be fat or depressed.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. Katy Wix: Well, there is this amazing book called The Shame of Death, Grief, and Trauma — it’s sort of like a psychological manual, in a way. I remember seeing the title and wondering what it meant by the shame of grief. There’s this chapter in it which explores the shame of having to bring death up. I think it’s so outside of the social norm. The profundity of it and the strangeness of it, it almost makes it a bit embarrassing. Like there would be times I’d be making small talk with someone and then I’d have to say, “anyway, I’ve got to go, my mother is dying”. Or when I’d just start crying in public. There was an awkwardness there — a breaking of the rules somehow.