Magda Szubanski has become a well-loved public figure over the course of her decades-long career in comedy, winning hearts for her performances as Esme Hoggett in the all-time porcine classic Babe, the often tragic yet consistently delightful Sharon Strzelecki in Kath and Kim, and countless others.
With the release of her memoir Reckoning, she reveals a previously unseen side of herself, delving deep into her own family history and how grief and war impacted on their lives and in turn shaped the person she is today.
As I spoke to Szubanski she was taking a brief break from “driving through the guts of Tasmania” to the next location of her book tour. Having pulled over in a spot with adequate phone reception and a view of a lake teeming with swans, she reflected on the process of writing her memoir. “It kind of poured out of me, to be honest. Some bits were more difficult to write than others, but a lot of it just sort of flowed onto the page. The original manuscript was enormous, it was 851 pages, because there was a lot of story to tell and there were lots of elements in it and I wanted to get everything out and then sift through and find what I wanted to keep in it.”
As well as shedding light on Szubanski’s formative years, Reckoning also examines the life of her father, Zbigniew, who lived in Warsaw during the Second World War and as a teenager was recruited into a top-secret execution squad as part of the Polish resistance against the Nazis.
Magda said this was one of the most difficult topics to cover in the book. “Writing stuff about my father killing people, to be honest, that was really hard. And doing the research I had to do about the war and the Holocaust, because I did a lot of reading about that to make sure I had a breadth of understanding about it… Some of that was harrowing.”
Szubanski also wrote extensively about some difficult moments in her own personal history, including her experience with depression as a teenager. “That churned up some stuff for me as well, to be honest. Those early days of realizing I was gay and what that meant and that isolation. That was a bit hard to revisit… I wish I could’ve known then what I know now.”
Her hope is that by sharing her own experiences she’ll be able to help other LGBT people and their families. “A lot of straight people and a lot of parents are reading the book and they’re getting it.
“When I talk about that thing of an LGBTQI child being a minority of one within the family, suddenly they go ‘Oh my god, I get it now’. They are on their own, figuring it out with no one to show them to the ropes.
“That’s the importance of community, you know. That’s why I’m the patron of Twenty10, which is an LGBTQI youth support group. Because I think that that isolation needs to be broken down” Szubanski said.
In her book, Szubanski also reflected on the positive response she had after she came out to the Australian public on The Project in 2012. “I have to say that the community’s been fantastic to me. It’s been really great and I’ve absolutely loved the interaction… It’s been amazing, how many people when they’ve come on this book tour have come up to me and talked about their journeys, and a lot of older gay people, like in their 50s and 60s and older, saying they’ve just come out and the journey they’ve been on. There’s people of all ages. Often the focus is on youth but there’s a lot of older people who’ve really suffered from discrimination early on and still haven’t quite gotten over that. So we have to be a bit gentle and kind on ourselves, I think.”
Magda Szubanski’s ‘Reckoning’ is available now.
Sophie Joske
