Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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You muddle your needs with someone else’s very easily, because you don’t think your body is worth defending. Cake becomes a strange villain, moving between the centre of events and their periphery, sometimes appearing casual and sometimes ceremonious. I now have a healthier relationship with food, in that I allow myself to enjoy it for what it is, but her patterns of refusing food as a way of investing in a future self and bingeing as a punishment for a past self were familiar, as was her sense of not wanting to eat in front of other people for fear of being found disgusting or being judged for having an appetite and not being the feminine ideal of small and bird like. Delicacy was a surprising read for the way it encouraged me to reflect on my own adolescence and adulthood.

We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child. Each chapter orbits a different kind of cake, and is given a pleasantly odd title, like ‘Low-fat Cakes, Or, Being Thin in Capitalist Spaces with Your Mum’. 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.She spends a lot of time examining the events in her childhood that complicated the pleasures of eating.

Here there’s a welcome admission that ‘being positive can come across as really creepy if you’re not careful’. 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”.This is a defining and terrible moment – it’s clear that D’s death hit Wix like a lightning bolt – yet it seems, somehow, that society is less understanding of prolonged grief when it is for a friend rather than a close family member. 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.

His words were pathetic, though, revealing a truth about bullies – that they cover over their inadequacies with bluster and are triggered by those they see as weak being cleverer than them. From the age of 14, on the recommendation of her doctor after a rare illness, Wix starts to take a daily walk in the woods with her dad and his dog.

Though each of the chapters of Delicacy feature a cake in its title, this – as its subtitle pre-warns – is not just a memoir about food and body issues. Where the book excels is in its readiness to court controversy without surrendering nuance, and in place of moralising it offers questioning that’s as necessary as it is unsettling. I think I was at the height of that little sliver of confidence you get before you have any knowledge of the real world,” she says.

She was 35 when “D” died and is 40 now; sometimes she feels like she lost her last few years of having fun. At the age of 26, Wix and her father were involved in a serious car accident – one that seemed to mark the start of a series of staggered and life-altering tragedies. You don’t really look at what you’re wearing or have time to brush your hair – wearing the same pair of shoes that were not going to give me blisters because I knew I’d be walking up and down hospital corridors. She has long been my favourite character actor and always brings those people to life that we feel, we also, have met along our way. Aged 11, she swerved into the path of a car on holiday in France because her parents didn’t listen when she said she didn’t want to cycle.At Books2Door, we believe that reading is a fundamental skill that every child should have to help improve their vocabulary, grammar, and critical thinking skills.