Magda Szubanski – What She Reckons

It’s impossible not to love Magda Szubanski. She is one of Australia’s best-known and most-loved performers and we adore her as the iconic character of Sharon Strzelecki in ABC-TV’s Kath and Kim.

She has also acted in films Babe, Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet, The Golden Compass and stage shows. Last year Magda released her memoir, The Reckoning, an extraordinarily surprising book in its scope. It’s here she tells the story of her assassin dad. Her insatiable hunger. Her realisation that she loved women. Sensitively crafted, insightful and unselfconscious. Or course her book is funny in parts. But it’s more than that. It’s an open invitation into the heart of a woman that we already love. Now we know why. It’s no coincidence that Szubanski won NSW Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction for her first book and memoir. She’s a natural storyteller.

Somehow Szubanski has managed to weave her whole complex tale seamlessly, uncovering insights into herself alongside the reader.

The voice in The Reckoning isn’t comedic. She’s not hiding behind character. It’s her.

‘When I started, I was looking at all sorts of things. I was going to do the weight-loss journey. I experimented with the comedic voice, and I wrote stuff after my dad died and it wasn’t funny. The voice in The Reckoning is how I talk. Most of us are quite thoughtful serious people and I wasn’t trying to be anything else; it’s very much who I am.’

Although even in her comedic endeavours, Szubanski is masterful when it comes to weaving the comedy and pathos.

‘Sharon is the classic sad clown. Those have a powerful place in culture, because we all feel that what’s life is like, at times tragic at times hilarious!

‘The book isn’t unremitting horror! But I wanted to come to grips with the intergenerational trauma.’

In her book Szubanski describes a childhood haunted by the demons of her father’s espionage activities in wartime Poland. This is the theme she chases down to unravel the complex truth of herself.

‘It makes complete sense to me. It is about the ability to understand the operating system we were born into and what’s pulling your levers. Although you are not who your ancestors were, it’s a dance between nature and nurture and what switches off the epigene that I find fascinating.’

Magda is a woman with considerable courage.

‘A different place and a different time,’ she laughs, ‘a different courage is required. I am obsessed with the fact that I am lazy and weak. I would be the first to collaborate.’

In The Reckoning her perceived weakness and shortcomings fall in the wake of her father’s shadow. He was a hero. At 18 he’d made decisions about who lived and who died.

‘It’s extraordinary the highs and lows of human nature. I was left with that legacy of what would I have done. It’s very present for other Polish people I know. I am once removed, but I characterise what my father experienced as a moral trauma. He had to make ridiculous decisions that a high court judge wouldn’t have to make. He was amazing; he had no bitterness. None. He had a basically sanguine nature. He picked himself up and he moved on; he didn’t focus on the past at all.’

But not this generation of Szubanski. She needed to know. Everything.

‘I was the botherer, the nuisance, always asking a lot of questions. I know a lot, because it was what I was obsessed with. Interestingly my brother doesn’t want to read the book; he has his own memories, he just doesn’t want to affect his own personal remembrances, and I understand that. Maybe because I was the younger one and was deprived of family as I grew up. His was a migrant story. Increasingly the world is full of refugees, people moving forward but with something missing.

‘I think you need to look back and feel that understanding of those early beginnings and what a trauma it would have been.

We live in a paradise here, and most of the people who wash up on these shores must have been brutalised. If you don’t have empathy for your own suffering it will be hard to have empathy for anything else.’

The Reckoning also lets us into Szubanski’s struggle with weight. Namely, what she describes as this insatiable hunger.

‘There is so much fat shaming. A recent study on The Biggest Loser and why they don’t keep the weight off showed the body created a hormone that makes you ravenous. I look at my father; all the Poles were put on starvation rations. And my grandfather on the Irish side – they were starving too. World wars affected everyone. Now when you have abundance, the body is going to go crazy…maybe it’s the skinny people who have it wrong!’

So how was the writing process?

‘It was fantastic – I loved it! It feels like my opus. I love writing. In some ways it comes more naturally than writing comedy, because I find those subjects about morality and courage and identity so readily. I find it fascinating. It’s interesting to step into another world. It’s a different world again. I feel fortunate that I can do it. It’s exciting at my age to step off on a different path, to do something quite serious. People pay their hard-earned money for a certain experience. Trust me, this is a different kind of ride and I think you will enjoy it. I have created that, I have led them to believe that’s what I am going to do. For me it’s been enormously gratifying, the way people have received the book. People have gone with it. It’s always all about communicating the human experience more. Next I think I should go and do a collaboration with the Australian Ballet!’

Magda Szubanski is one of the featured writers at the Byron Writers Festival, 5–7 August.

Earlybird Tickets now on sale at www.byronwritersfestival.com.au.