Review: I Can\u2019t Tell You But I Will \u2013 Magda Szubanski (Text Publishing)<\/p>\n
That memoir, which took eight years to write, centres on her relationship with her father, a Polish assassin who served in a top-secret counterintelligence unit during the second world war. \u201cIf you had met my father,\u201d the book begins, \u201cyou would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.\u201d<\/p>\n
Szubanski\u2019s new memoir, I Can\u2019t Tell You But I Will<\/a>, is an ode to her mother, \u201cthe love of [her] life\u201d. It traces their tumultuous relationship against the backdrop of her mother\u2019s death, which came just weeks before the result of the historic Australian same-sex marriage postal survey in 2017, for which Szubanski was the public face. <\/p>\n It was, Szubanski reflects, \u201ca hard, hard book to write\u201d. <\/p>\n In May 2025, the comedian revealed on Instagram that she had been diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma<\/a>, a rare and aggressive blood cancer with a high chance of relapse. It is \u201cone of the nasty ones\u201d, she said, though she has since revealed<\/a> she is in \u201cdeep remission\u201d.<\/p>\n In her new book, she writes:<\/p>\n I had begun dying, although I didn\u2019t know it then. My cancer diagnosis [\u2026] changed everything \u2014 literally. My bone marrow, my mitochondria, my nerves and tendons. I\u2019m still processing it.<\/p>\n And in the preface: \u201cI am finishing this book in a world vastly different from the one in which I began it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018A classic case of trauma\u2019<\/p>\n In both her books, Szubanski prises open \u201cthe rib cage\u201d of her family history to expose \u201cits beating, bleeding heart\u201d. In I Can\u2019t Tell You But I Will, she names the source of the shame she struggled with in Reckoning.<\/p>\n In August 2019, almost two years after her mother\u2019s death, as the Victorian Court of Appeal upheld<\/a> Cardinal George Pell\u2019s convictions for historical child sexual abuse, Szubanski learned from her older sister Barb that her mother was gang-raped at the age of eight by a group of boys she had outplayed in a soccer game.<\/p>\n \u201cSuddenly, everything makes sense,\u201d Szubanski writes. \u201cOn fast rewind, my mind spools back through our whole life together. I understand why my mother was terrified of standing out, of being better at anything, of making people jealous.\u201d<\/p>\n In the following pages, Szubanski discloses that she, too, is a victim of childhood sexual abuse:<\/p>\n I pushed his hands away. But his hands were like the grasping tentacles of an octopus, pulling off my clothes. And I stood there naked in that shed in front of a boy I found repulsive and a girl I had a crush on. I can\u2019t remember how many times it happened, but I know it was many times over the course of years.<\/p>\n \u201cHow can something happen to you that you don\u2019t understand?\u201d Szubanski asks. \u201cWhy are we so fucked up about sex?\u201d She concludes, \u201cthe silence is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the shame\u201d.<\/p>\n For Szubanski, who has been in various forms of therapy since 1990, including psychotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy<\/a>, writing is the only way to untangle \u201cthe rats nest of intergenerational trauma\u201d she believes was woven into her genes long before she was born.<\/p>\n When she arrived on April 12 1961 \u2013 the same day Yuri Gagarin went into space \u2013 she was born starving. \u201cMy mother suffered terribly from toxaemia during pregnancy,\u201d Szubanski recalls. <\/p>\n This meant that in utero I was being poisoned and there was not sufficient nutrition passing through the placenta. So as my brain and nervous system were forming they were receiving information that there was not enough food for me [\u2026] I suspect my body has been trying to make up for it ever since. <\/p>\n Years later, in Byron Bay on a rainforest retreat, the adult Szubanski wakes in the night to the inexplicable sound of gunshots. As she cowers alone in her cabin, not daring to turn on the light, she realises \u201ctrauma is not just an isolated incidence of horror\u201d or \u201ca discrete unit of fear\u201d. Rather, \u201cit becomes one\u2019s way of being in the world\u201d.<\/p>\n This was when I gave my trauma a nickname: the Matrix. It was as though I glimpsed my own operating system, and I took advantage of it to observe and access my various oddnesses. At a glance, I had all the characteristics of a classic case of trauma: binge eating, occasional suicidal ideation, problems with impulse control and affect regulation.<\/p>\n Naming her trauma does more than explain the past; it changes how Szubanski imagines the future:<\/p>\n There is something I have learnt over my six-and-a-half decades: the defence mechanisms we acquire to survive in the first half of our life are the things that kill us in the second half.<\/p>\n \u2018Vicious\u2019 trolling galvanised others<\/p>\n Szubanski\u2019s books are not celebrity memoirs in the conventional sense. She doesn\u2019t name-drop or place-drop, nor does she let the spotlight flatter her. She refuses to frame her story as one of triumph. <\/p>\n Instead, she probes the gendered ramifications of fame and the gulf between her public persona and her private self. She presents her life as a fusion of fitting in and misfitting, blending in and standing out. With unsparing precision, she reflects on her transformation from artist to activist during the marriage equality debate, and on what it cost to speak up during \u201can ideological gunfight\u201d. <\/p>\n \u201cI have always thought that I could die for a cause,\u201d she writes, \u201cbut I wasn\u2019t sure if I could live for one.\u201d<\/p>\n Szubanski describes the online abuse that followed her public appearances during the Yes campaign as \u201ca barrage of steaming hate and nonsense\u201d. \u201cI never understood until now why people kill themselves over internet trolling,\u201d she reflects: \u201cit\u2019s the sheer volume.\u201d<\/p>\n Such attacks, especially on women, are hardly new, but the trolling of Szubanski was particularly vicious<\/a>. She calls it \u201ca demolition job [with] high-density explosives placed at strategic spots\u201d and writes: \u201cI have never felt so hated.\u201d<\/p>\n Ironically, research<\/a> on performative trolling suggests the vitriolic abuse backfired. Rather than silencing Szubanski, it galvanised others and incited further expressions of support.<\/p>\n The highs and lows<\/p>\n The uneasy pairing of pain and joy \u2013 in herself and those she loves \u2013 is the central theme of Szubanski\u2019s life, and her writing.<\/p>\n Her father, \u201ca feminist male chauvinist\u201d, raised her to believe she can be \u201cas good as any man [\u2026] at anything\u201d. But when she finally came out to her parents, he insisted the \u201cgay gene\u201d wasn\u2019t from his side.<\/p>\n Szubanski\u2019s mother, \u201ca grand and complex woman\u201d with \u201ca demon inside her\u201d, subsisted on lollies and Cadbury Favourites. She wielded \u201cthe only weapon she had: her thinness\u201d to taunt her daughter: \u201cThe only time you ever get up is to go to the fridge! You had such a belting figure and to see you distorting yourself like that!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn the psychological war between my parents,\u201d Szubanski writes, \u201cI was collateral damage.\u201d<\/p>\n In December 2017, as the same-sex marriage bill ran \u201cthe gauntlet of its adversaries\u201d in the House of Representatives, Szubanski watched from the public gallery. She recounts how Bob Katter dismissed the debate as \u201ctotally irrelevant\u201d, as if it were \u201csome frivolous distraction from the real business of government\u201d. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll see you back in the land of the people,\u201d Katter spat, \u201cand you won\u2019t be quite so popular there.\u201d<\/p>\n Szubanski reads the threat as \u201cthe political equivalent of: you might be protected in here, but do not count on that protection out there\u201d.<\/p>\n When at last the bill passed, Szubanski celebrated with Kerryn Phelps and her partner Jackie \u2013 pioneering advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights \u2013 and with Christine Forster, a former Liberal councillor, gay rights activist, and the younger sister of ex-prime minister Tony Abbott.<\/p>\n Szubanski has the gift of the gab, but it\u2019s her empathy that impresses:<\/p>\n I look at Christine to see how [Abbott\u2019s] appearance has affected her: her brother walking into the highest law-making body in the land to put this bill through one last ordeal. I think about how supportive my own brother has been, and cannot imagine what it feels like to have your brother not merely oppose your right to marry, but pursue the cause repeatedly, publicly, and with such relish.<\/p>\n Once marriage equality is enshrined in law, Szubanski, characteristically modest, is unequivocal about who the moment belongs to:<\/p>\n It belongs to the people who marched, wrote, phoned, doorknocked, argued with relatives, endured the survey, opened their lives for public inspection, and then got up the next morning and kept going. It belongs to the people who did not live to see it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/file-20261007-60-4rx250.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/file-20261007-60-w1t64f.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n