Delicacy: A memoir about cake and death

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Whilst I do still feel it a bit strange trying to rate a person's experiences, especially when it comes to them describing their experiences of death, I have to say that I really enjoyed this book (enjoyed - I honestly don't know what the most appropriate word would be there). As they say, you never stop grieving a loved one, you simply learn to live with the grief – the wound heals over while the scar tissue remains. Instead, she produced a forensic piece of life-writing, which begins with the line, “Let me tell you why I rode my bike into oncoming traffic”. You don’t have the energy for romance, you don’t feel small enough anyway despite what friends say, and the hunger keeps you adrenalised and awake at night.

Perhaps mourning begins the moment a baby first realises that it is a separate being from its mother.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. This bold claim appears in Delicacy’s first few pages, and it made me hope the book was going to demolish the entire concept of cakes, as a sort of down-with-patisseries equivalent to the well-known anarchist pamphlet Abolish Restaurants. Eight or 9 days after her father’s death, after a grim descent into dementia, her mother thought that she heard a gunshot on the stairs; a few nights later, she thought she heard a choir; and a few days after that she collapsed on the landing. My walks with my dad were at a younger age, walking the guard dog at the place where he worked across rough ground that used to hold a cotton mill. org/best-welsh-non-fiction-books-of-2023/ Our book Birdsplaining: A Natural History by Jasmine Donahaye makes the Wales Arts Review 2023 pick of the year for nonfiction!

Sometimes you do things and you think, well, it’s not changing the face of television, but it’s nice people and it’s OK. 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”. Raw and honest, she lays bare some of the most important relationships in her life, and is frank and fearless when she talking about her issues with food. Making my decision over the recent job offer reminded me of how much I miss her, the person I discussed most of my big life decisions with, until the day her awareness of her dementia led her to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you any more. She turns her pain into poetry: intimate, candid, exquisitely described, deftly using words rich with grace, pain and power.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I held off reading this book due to the subject matter, as a woman I her late 30s the fear of losing my parents is something that plays on my mind more than I think it should. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item.