Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Sometimes I would stay and watch the Bond film, just to be in the same room as him. But it made being a woman look awful. This glimpse of my future life – where the women were there to move the plot along or be aggressively kissed until they stopped wriggling – frightened me. I remember thinking, “When I grow up, I’ll never have blonde hair or drive a car or be a woman at all. I’ll find a way out and I’ll always be in charge of the TV remote.” The first thing to do was never to get hips. So I started skipping meals. Your parents were quite arty, working in dance companies and the theatre. Did your childhood allow for much TV watching? At first, I didn’t understand what happened to my best friend. We spoke on a Tuesday and then he was dead on a Thursday. 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: Quite an unusually written book really. 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!

Jones, Alice (15 April 2021). "Katy Wix on comedy, cake and death: 'I just wanted to scream at people' ". inews.co.uk . Retrieved 31 December 2022. Now, I get to write about him, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I wouldn’t have been able to write about going to my first concert with him, rolling down big hills in West Wales with him, taking hallucinogens and thinking we were made of milk, or how he was funnier than most professional comedians I know. Before, I was too shy to write, definitely too shy to write autobiographically, and now I can’t stop. I get to write about him even though there is a voice in my head, even now, telling me that it’s not good enough. It’s true: no writing will be good enough to represent him. And I’d trade all the words for him. Welsh telly was slightly different to the rest of the country. We have S4C rather than Channel 4. I remember going through the TV listings and seeing what was on normal Channel 4, like The Word, then I’d look at Welsh Channel 4 and it would just be something boring in Welsh at the same time.

There was a film we watched when we were kids featuring the alien puppets Zig and Zag, and I can’t remember why but during the film at regular intervals there was an announcement “this film has nothing, we repeat, nothing to do with toast”. At times reading this book I thought “this chapter has nothing to do with cake”. Sometimes the links were tenuous at best, and sometimes the shorter passages felt like fillers. Insert some kind of cake metaphor here. Brilliantly original, funny and insightful. Dry and comic, but also very moving. I absolutely loved Delicacy‘ – Katy Brand I didn’t feel pressure to give any kind of guide on how to cope with grief. I didn’t even feel particularly pressured to write a positive ending, it just happened. I think because I’ve come from writing comedy I felt so self conscious of the shifts in tone. To have been in comedy for so long, where everything is steeped in irony, to suddenly be so sincere was hard. That’s partly why reading would help me so much because I could see things that were worth saying without joking. The reader ultimately came to the forefront of my mind when I was in the editing process. I’d written everything down and the first version was almost like a journal so then I had to turn it into something more. I was really just aiming to be fair and honest.

McCrum, Kirstie (23 March 2013). "Katy Wix is Wales' newest funny girl". WalesOnline . Retrieved 31 December 2022.

Caragh Medlicott: It’s almost unfathomable that people are expected to function after such a short period of time. Whatever the reason Katy Wix decided to leave the show, it’s clear her character will be hugely missed! How did fans react to Katy Wix leaving the role of Mary?