There is a lot about bullying in this book that echoes my own experience as a tall, clever, quiet girl who used humour to diffuse tension and was often seen as the wrong kind of different by my peers. 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. Cakes, to her, are ‘weird, camp objects that seem to appear whenever something emotionally devastating is happening’, sugary totems for her misery. Yet, after the accident, it is not just the communication of their father-daughter relationship which improves, but Wix’s own understanding of intimacy. It’s a talent which can allow both a saga about oatcakes and profound reflections on death to peacefully coexist at home in the same text.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. It’s a quality evidently possessed by Wix and yet, far from a collection of aphorisms, Delicacy toes the line of novelty and novelistic in the way that all good memoirs do; at some points a linear story – and at others a series of vivid, flickering vignettes – its poignant memory of childhood and adolescence, of the formation of body image issues, of grief and familial relationships, are of the kind that send the reader’s own wheels of memory turning. Afterwards, I ripped the box up into small pieces and threw them away, so that in the morning no trace of the cake could be found.

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. 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! As she reaches adolescence, and then young adulthood, Wix enters a toxic cycle of starvation and binging.

It is that very tension, between the surreal and the serious, that suffuses Delicacy in both its content and construction. As a teenager, Wix realised the power she had over men thanks to an encounter with a lecherous adult male who demeaned his wife in public and, after Wix ruined the punchline to his joke just because she could, used his physicality to threaten her. Conversely, every time I binged, I was fixed on the past, because bingeing is always a message from a past self about trauma. That book is Delicacy, “a memoir about cake and death”, per its subtitle, which reads like a quietly furious howl.It’s as if you have finished a game of pass-the-parcel that lasted for years, only to find no gift at the centre. It is – in many ways – an experience common to womanhood, the realisation that being a girl, being a woman, is hard; that after your body ceases – as Wix puts it – to be a “neutral zone”, there is an embarking upon a journey of push-and-pull, the denial of sustenance combined with the inevitable craving, and caving, to the numbing power of coveted food.