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. Although she shared this about the cast ahead of the series four: “We’ve all known each other for a long time, since the Horrible Histories days. 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. Before my friend died I was too shy to write, definitely too shy to write autobiographically, and now I can’t stop. But I’d trade all the words for him’: Katy Wix. Photograph: Roo Lewis/The Observer He came to visit me and hated the tube and only wanted to go to Camden. We sat in the corner of a red pub that only played Oasis. Occasionally, between the giggling, a look passed between us and we would see in each other’s eyes that maybe we weren’t happy, but weren’t going to talk about it. Now, I wish we had. The only thing he said, as we spilled out on to the street, was that he found adult life “boring and uncreative”. Now I eat the foods he liked and use words he liked and say our jokes to myself

Sometimes I would stay and watch the Bond film, just to be in the same room as him. But it made being a woman look awful. This glimpse of my future life – where the women were there to move the plot along or be aggressively kissed until they stopped wriggling – frightened me. I remember thinking, “When I grow up, I’ll never have blonde hair or drive a car or be a woman at all. I’ll find a way out and I’ll always be in charge of the TV remote.” The first thing to do was never to get hips. So I started skipping meals. She played Phoebe in Tom Basden's stage comedy Party and its subsequent three series spin-off on BBC Radio 4 also called Party. Wix wrote and co-starred in the same station's comedy series Bird Island, which also featured Reece Shearsmith, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Alison Steadman.The star has also created her own TV comedy show Fat Camp, set in a children’s diet retreat, which she also stars in. Deeply comforting in how relatable it is, hilarious, and moving. I felt like this book was my best friend as soon as I started reading it’ She was burned at the stake on the grounds of Button House, implying she worked there as a servant.

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. Katy Wix: You know, we recently recorded the audiobook and when we got to that bit it was really weird. I hadn’t even thought about that chapter and how I was going to convey it — I was like: Am I going to change my voice? Am I going to whisper? It sounds a bit like a pantomime. It works on the paper but reading it aloud it got a bit complicated. From Delicacy: The Interviews YouTube seriesI paused my never-ending projects of self-improvement (get Michelle Obama arms, read Middlemarch, give up Diet Coke). I couldn’t improve in any way or be productive. I could just survive. When getting out of bed was difficult, I broke things down into threes, to make them manageable: 1) push duvet off; 2) put feet on floor; 3) stand. This was the most I had ever done for my emotional wellbeing and I have my friend to thank for that. When you are the one hurting yourself, you are never safe. It was nice to start to feel safe in my own company again. If I could just make my body smaller, firmer, then I would be protected from things like this happening again. A thin body conveyed restraint, self-worth, and no one would think to abuse it. I believed thinness was a protection from misuse and harm. Society stands up for the thin body. McCrum, Kirstie (23 March 2013). "Katy Wix is Wales' newest funny girl". WalesOnline . Retrieved 31 December 2022.