Then everything was quiet and still, except the white powder from the air bags hovering above the dashboard, and an immense heat in my chest. We had come to a stop in the middle of a dual carriageway. “I’m dead,” was my first thought. “I’ve died at 25. I had such potential and now I’m dead. I’ll never go on a panel show and I’ll never fall in love. I’ve died.” I looked down at my body. There was no blood, but I could taste some in my mouth. I looked over at my dad. He was slumped in his seat, not moving, eyes closed. I’d remembered from watching Casualty that you should repeat the person’s first name to keep them conscious. So rather than use “Dad”, I began to yell his name to try and wake him. When the paramedics arrived, on hearing this, they asked if he was my partner and then I died for real, of embarrassment. A book that has the rare quality of being both poetic and accessible . . . missing Delicacy would be a huge mistake.’– Guardian

Comedy Women in Print Prize 2021 announces judges including Maureen Lipman, Susan Wokoma and Steph McGovern 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. Ultimately it’s going to be a lifelong thing. For me, I’ve realised it’s so integrated into my sense of self. 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. I didn’t expect there to be a solution there. Women around me said things like, you know, being a woman is just starving and occasionally having some pudding at Christmas. This was presented to me as just to be expected. Gentle, heartbreaking, laugh out loud funny and poetically told - an intimate memoir that stays with you'

Caragh Medlicott: I always think that prose poetry is closer to the reality of how we experience emotions anyway. We sort of impose a narrative after the fact. To give a feel for the tone of Delicacy, the opening line is: ‘Let me tell you why I rode my bike into oncoming traffic,’ and yet this is one of the least of the traumatic events in a book that’s full of them. We started to go on small walks. Dad asked me to forgive him’: Katy Wix. Photograph: Kristina Varaksina/The Observer

Cakes are weird, camp objects that seem to appear whenever something emotionally devastating is happening to me. They represent everything that is false and cloying. I resent cakes: their condescending frilliness, the fact that they don't want me to tell the truth. When someone appeared with tea and cake in the middle of a family psychodrama, what they are really saying was: Let's all eat our feelings instead of expressing them" (p.2). Katy is a stunning writer, seamlessly moving between bitingly funny moments and moments that make you violently, cathartically sob at 2am. An absolute belter of a book that stays with you’– Roisin Conaty The language of pain isn’t helpful. The placement of pain, on a scale from one to ten, relies on having been in pain before.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. She worried that she might have fallen out of love with being funny. “It just felt like lying, really inauthentic. I couldn’t handle how false it felt. I didn’t want to do comedy, I wanted to talk about what was happening to me. I just lost my sense of humour. But comedy brings a lot of people joy. Being silly is still really important and the two sitting side by side is the sign of a healthy person.” For a while, after everything happened, she thought she might not return to comedy, that she might move to the country, do something to help others. “And then, I can’t remember, I did a tweet and forgot about it,” she deadpans. “But there is definitely a before and after with these events.”

She’s now in very early discussions about adapting Delicacy for television. I wonder what her parents might have made of it? “I’ve tried to be kind to them. I felt too guilty about throwing them under the bus. It’s a grown-up thing to say, ‘this was a complex relationship, they were flawed people, and that’s OK.’ I don’t think it’s the same as saying, ‘they didn’t love me’”, she smiles, pushing her glasses up her nose. “They loved me, in the way they knew how to and that’s all we can do, I guess.” I liked the premise of the book, linking cake with significant life events, but she should have leaned into it more. She should have been stricter about it.

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Katy Wix: It’s funny, isn’t it? Something I wanted to explore when I was writing was this atmosphere I felt growing up. One I didn’t really understand at the time but, retrospectively, had to do with being objectified. Like wearing a pretty dress and being told to do a twirl as a child. That feeling of being an object which ultimately led to self-objectification. In a weird way, writing has been one way out of that. Like I know when I can manage to see myself as a whole person I have a much nicer day, right? So when I seriously sit down to write it’s liberating, I have this feeling that I’m just a brain — that it’s just me and my words — no one is looking at me. I was really exalted in that feeling; I found it very healing. Katy Wix in BBC One sitcom Ghosts At age 26, Wix was involved in a serious car accident, which has affected her health ever since. [11] Filmography [ edit ] Film [ edit ] Year It’s written about less – what it’s like to lose a best friend,” she says. “You don’t get a word for it, like orphan. When I say, ‘I lost my friend’, it doesn’t cover it. But if I say, ‘I lost my best friend’, it just sounds like I’m 10 years old.” Katy Wix (centre) as Fergie in ‘The Windsors’ (Photo: Angus Young/ Channel 4) Brimming with graceful, charming writing – this book perfectly encapsulates so many moments we face as girls and women and I only wish I’d read it sooner’– Kiri Pritchard-McLean In a letter to her departed friend, identified only by his initial, she notes with a wry darkness: ‘Grief is so strange, D. You get asked to do podcasts.’ And while writing about mourning her mother, she can’t help but reflect on the consequences, and whether ‘I’ll be asked to go on Celebrity Bake Off once this book comes out, the stand-up-to-cancer one’.