Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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And then something like Stath comes along, and oh my God, it is just the most creatively exciting, weird thing.

The last section in particular where Katy summarises the knowledge she has gained about grief was beautifully written and I think may be of real comfort to someone who is currently grieving.Instead, it is the one for which the chapter is named – ‘The First Cake’ – an event which is preceded by Wix’s statement that: “My mother’s hopes for me were that I would always be happy and thin. She thinks it has, thanks to shows such as Shrill, but is still waiting for a script that doesn’t comment on a character’s size. Her best friend and both her parents died within months of each other, the grief triggering a paralysing depression.

It takes the form of an extended letter written to the chair of the board of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum, by a nameless historian who’s found himself trapped in a career as a tour guide of Holocaust sites in Poland – immersive, horror-filled work that’s quite naturally driven him to a nervous breakdown. Without the magazines there, to remind me that I should constantly be trying to improve myself and my body, then I would descend into chaos, happiness even. They are baked and bought and offered in relation to varieties of harm that are all brought to the page vividly, without sentimentality.This is what happens, if you’ve been body-shamed from a young age: you lose the ability to feel as though your body is your own. 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!