Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Many of these chapters are about her mother's final illness and surviving the grief when she died, such as "Chimney cake, or, The thoughts I have about cancer when I open my fridge door at night for a snack". You muddle your needs with someone else’s very easily, because you don’t think your body is worth defending. It’s also extremely sad in places as Katy has experienced intense grief (both her parents and her best friend died in quick succession).

It’s true that those familiar with Wix’s television work might have anticipated a very different book, one reflective of her quick humour and wit, but Delicacy is still darkly – and fabulously – funny. It’s a confusing one, because it says something about mothers and strangeness that just isn’t true, but it’s also a useful one, since it makes us wonder if Wix might care about sentence-making the same way Duras does. Now I’ve read her memoir, I understand better the deep well of experience she draws from in these performances. Memories of her family and growing up form long chapters, interspersed with chapters that are more aphorism than narrative.Cardiff's libraries appear to be under threat again, including the suggestion that hard copies of magazines will no longer be available. And yet, there is something in Wix’s articulation of this grief that expresses the layering of pain, the heavy burden of its accumulation, without rendering it faceless – each loss is still, clearly and uniquely its own. Veteran American literary scholar Arnold Weinstein presents an irresistible thesis in this agile, instantly engaging work of personal literary criticism.

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. It is – in many ways – an experience common to womanhood, the realisation that being a girl, being a woman, is hard; that after your body ceases – as Wix puts it – to be a “neutral zone”, there is an embarking upon a journey of push-and-pull, the denial of sustenance combined with the inevitable craving, and caving, to the numbing power of coveted food. The fact this grief is followed by the loss of her father, and the crushing and unanticipated discovery of her mother’s inoperable brain tumour, is incomprehensibly tragic. Katy has a beautifully poetic way with words, her melancholy and humour are juxtaposed as well as being one and the same.One day we ourselves would probably be that empty seat, and everyone would just carry on doing sums. I don’t think it’s the same as saying, ‘they didn’t love me’”, she smiles, pushing her glasses up her nose. For Wix, that experience has been intriguingly, and somewhat unusually, related to the omnipresence of cakes during tragic periods of her life; “cakes are weird, camp objects that seem to appear whenever something emotionally devastating is happening to me”.