A stunning book in which darkness and light, tragedy and humour, pain and hope are all masterfully, affectingly balanced’–Liam Williams Caragh Medlicott: I watched the YouTube interviews you did to go along with the book and heard you say that reading other people’s memoirs sometimes jogged your own memory, and that reading other people’s stories in general was more enriching than self-help books. It made me think of a quote from Kazuo Ishiguro: “In the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. […] Does it feel this way to you?” — I wondered, how much did you think about the reader when you were writing? Was there anything you hoped people would take from it? The star has also created her own TV comedy show Fat Camp, set in a children’s diet retreat, which she also stars in.

We started to go on small walks. Dad asked me to forgive him’: Katy Wix. Photograph: Kristina Varaksina/The Observer 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. Do you know Iyanla Vanzant? She started off on The Oprah Winfrey Show – I love Oprah so much – and she’s a TV therapist/healer/spiritual. She’s got a show you can only get on American TV called Iyanla: Fix My Life. She just speaks so much wisdom. She spends a week with people who are really traumatised and it’s their healing journey. It’s so moving, it’s so profound. She’s doing incredible work for the human race. 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. Young women were supposed to be desired and pretty, not moon-faced and depressed, pretend-eating pasta with their mums. 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.I began to type: ‘Of course, I forgive you. It was years ago now. We were only young, we’re very different people now. We were teenagers. Let’s just move on . . .’ As I was writing it, I thought things like, This is so kind of me and, This is the right thing to do and, It feels good to do the right thing and, How nice of her. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t press ‘send’. A few days later, I recounted the whole thing to my therapist during our session and told her what my draft reply had said, waiting at home to be sent. She said, ‘And is that how you feel?’ and I thought for a while, and then I said, ‘No. No, that’s definitely not how I feel,’ and she said, ‘Well, don’t send it then,’ and I thought, What a good therapist. So, that evening, I replied with the truth instead. ‘No, I don’t forgive you,’ I wrote and pressed ‘send’. I binge-watched Taskmaster recently and loved how creative Katy was in her series. Then when she had a stand-in for a couple of episodes I was something like intrigued (too nosy/cold) or concerned (too earnest). I’ve always been interested by people’s absence. I remember at school when someone would go to the medical room and then get sent home. I’d be so distracted by their abandoned belongings and the empty seat. Those things drew attention to the fact that we’d be carrying on with our days as normal whilst our friend was consumed by their debilitating personal drama, probably throwing up or plagued with toothache or feeling like the world was going to end. One day we ourselves would probably be that empty seat, and everyone would just carry on doing sums. When Katy was missing, I sensed that she was struggling with more than a cold, and it made the laughter in the episode feel hollow.

Writing on a fan forum, one said: “I cried so hard. I’m devastated! Mary has been my favourite from the start. I’m so sad.” Katy Wix recently starred in the new Channel 4 sitcom Big Boys, which has been renewed for series two.When I start to think that they’ve written the best, hard hitting episode of the show, I’m always proven wrong because they do it again and again,” said another. Food was my way of controlling time. Not eating was a way of attempting time travel. Every time I refused food, I was investing in my future self, a better me. Conversely, every time I binged, I was fixed on the past, because bingeing is always a message from a past self about trauma. Not eating is a rebellion against a grown-up body and a grown-up world. If binge-eating could speak, it wouldn’t have a future tense. 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. 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).

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:Katy Wix: Yeah, exactly. And I think that those numbered fragments made sense because I felt like I was outside of normal time. It’s such a cliche, especially when someone dies, to say that time stops, and I don’t think it did stop, exactly, but it changed. I felt outside of other people’s time. Their lives were just carrying on and that becomes an outrageous idea when you’re grieving. 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.