Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

Product Information

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! It’s also extremely sad in places as Katy has experienced intense grief (both her parents and her best friend died in quick succession). The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter.

I heard myself scream, “Oh God, no, no, no,” over the crunching burst of brakes and the shrill squeaking of tyres. At the end of the episode, she asked Alison why she hadn’t given the rest of the ghosts a punishment, asking: “Where the justice was! I’m not usually one for writing in books, it feels forbidden, but I found myself underlining sentences that spoke to me.

It was the combination of brute strength and these massive, soulful, pained eyes – which I still look for in men – that absolutely got me.

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’ve dyed my hair dark, which she said was ageing, and I’ve grown it long, which she said made my neck look short. I wondered how you approached writing it, and how you found the transition from the script writing you’d done previously?

Growing up with a mother constantly on a diet, learning to hate your body, awful situations with men and the terribly wrong thinking back then. Alison and the ghosts picked a star in the sky to be Mary and we all had to finally accept that Mary was not coming back.

Sometimes it would be of Brecon on a sunny day, sometimes it would be a little sketch he had done of a castle. 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! It was the first time I’d seen adults being silly and coming up with absurd situations that were my sense of humour. Conversely, every time I binged, I was fixed on the past, because bingeing is always a message from a past self about trauma.I have to say that I found this refreshing, as the memoir then came across as just a book about her experiences as a human being with feelings, rather than a celebrity baring it all, so to speak. When she finally achieves the goal of ‘thinness’ in her early twenties she is appalled to find that “being thin means nothing” – a revelation which means facing up to the perpetually undelivered societal promise that “someone would meet my outrageous needs if I could just memorise a few weight-loss tips”. When I was in my 20s and I first went to therapy, we would talk about various things but it wouldn’t even occur to me to talk about what I was going through with food.

It would mean walking arm in arm down the road with a body that wasn’t ideal, but he would have to tell the world that this was the body he had fallen in love with, and that maybe what he thought he needed and what he thought love would look like had been wrong all along. The tears fell down my cheeks and on to the pillow, making it wet, because I couldn’t wipe them away. She started off on The Oprah Winfrey Show – I love Oprah so much – and she’s a TV therapist/healer/spiritual. Prior to the accident, Wix seemed to feel stumped and somewhat snubbed by the obscurity of her father’s past; “I began to wonder who he was […] there was so much I didn’t know”.

As they say, you never stop grieving a loved one, you simply learn to live with the grief – the wound heals over while the scar tissue remains. Wix wrote and co-starred in the same station's comedy series Bird Island, which also featured Reece Shearsmith, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Alison Steadman. I looked at her and wondered when and how I had somehow got the message that, despite knowing that I was smart, my real goal should be to have someone fall in love with me; that would be the pinnacle of being a girl.