‘I was grieving’: Actress turned author Anna McGahan on marriage breakdown and family loss

Personal heartbreak has shaped the life and career of a popular Australian actress.

Actress Anna McGahan starred in Underbelly.

Not so long ago, Anna McGahan came across her copy of The White Earth, the 2005 Miles Franklin Award winning novel by her late uncle, Andrew McGahan.

In it, the highly regarded novelist, who died in 2019 from pancreatic cancer, had penned just two words to his niece: “Write on.”

Anna McGahan has done just that, writing her way through all her seasons since. Seasons of stardom and fame. Love and regret. Marriage and motherhood. Faith and sexuality. Births and deaths.

It’s been quite the ride, and all of it, all this, as she says “holding on and letting go” has found at least some of its way into her first novel, Immaculate.

Author and actor Anna McGahan at home. Picture: David Kelly

The book is this year’s winner of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for Young Writers. Considered the nation’s most prestigious award for an unpublished manuscript, writers must be under the age of 35 to enter. And as McGahan, who turned 35 in May this year, explains, she “just scraped in”. Stuck in a place of grieving – for her marriage which had recently imploded, her church which she had left after 10 years as a faithful congregant, her Uncle Andrew, her Aunt Margy who had also passed away, and her beloved father Tim McGahan, who died in 2021, also from pancreatic cancer – the first-time fiction writer says she began writing Immaculate in a fever of “love and grief”.

“I say this as a confession – not to say it was easy – but I started to write it eight weeks out of the Vogel deadline,” McGahan says.

“I was grieving and I was immobile in that grief, and I thought to myself, ‘McGahan, the only way you’re going to get through this is by writing your way through it.’ I had always said I was going to enter the Vogel, and I was just about to turn 35, so I needed to write so fast. I smashed my way through it and while it was not easy, at the same time I just kind of let it all out. I sat down and I thought to myself, ‘It might be unreadable but whatever it is, I don’t care. I will abandon myself to it and I will not lie.’”

Anna McGahan, with her book. Picture: David Kelly

The result is a blistering account of a woman’s – Frances – unravelling. It is also a technically original and clever work, littered with texts, letters, news articles, medical and police reports, and its first person narrative is informed by biblical titles.

While it is not a memoir, Frances’s life arc mirrors McGahan’s in many ways. The protagonist is newly divorced from her pastor husband, Lucas, and from their Pentecostal church, Eternal Fire. Their child Neve has a terminal illness, which their church insists can be cured by prayer.

Into this narrative enters a 16-year-old, homeless, pregnant girl called Penelope who has adopted the name Mary, and is insisting her condition is the product of an immaculate conception.

Actor Anna McGahan as Nellie Cameron in Underbelly: Razor.

Frances is also exploring her queerness, and McGahan, who also identifies as queer, says the seeds of her Vogel prize-winning book and many of its themes were planted during her other career – that of an award-winning actress.

Many readers will recognise McGahan for her screen roles including accolade-winning performances in Underbelly: Razor, House Husbands and The Doctor Blake Mysteries.

“When touring or doing television shows, I spent time volunteering with the Salvation Army street missions – I had an ability to make coffee because I was an actor,” she laughs, “I saw and was so inspired by meeting people who were so disenfranchised and so disrespected, and the people devoted to giving them a good meal, a good night’s sleep and who treated them with sincere dignity. And I began to think about what the Christian faith would do now with someone claiming they were a virgin about to give birth to the messiah, how would she be treated?

“For my Mary, the pressure is on this very young, at-risk woman and the assumptions made on her ability to care for her child. She is so endearing to me, this kind of annoying, sassy, rough-as-guts version of the original. And I think that’s where Immaculate began.”

Anna McGahan with her two young daughters. Picture: Instagram

It continued with the character of Frances, who shares echoes of McGahan’s life: while Frances’s child is diagnosed with terminal cancer, McGahan’s first-born daughter was born prematurely, at 33 weeks, and required constant care.

“So I know the terror of that, and that understanding that you would do anything to make them better,” she says.

Now a mother of two, just as birth informs Immaculate, so too does death.

Death shadows the book, just as it did McGahan’s life for a period of time. The loss of her father, highly respected vascular surgeon, Tim McGahan, is one his daughter carries deeply. Always close, McGahan’s voice noticeably lightens when she speaks of the much-loved doctor.

“Well, he came from this big, sprawling Irish Catholic family, from out Dalby way, with 10 kids. He was this very scientific person, but he also loved music and books, he read everything, so did my mother Robyn and even though it was very, very tough to see, I feel like my dad had a beautiful death, with so much love surrounding him, and I feel like I learnt so much from him during that time.

Anna McGahan with her late father, Tim. Picture: Instagram

“I think as much as I am so happy to have won the Vogel, the hardest part is that my dad never got to see that, or read my book.”

Nor did the man who wrote those two simple words “Write on” to his niece, but Andrew McGahan’s imprint is on the book – not in a contextual sense, but in the courage it took to write it.

“What Andrew showed me, and he was a very quiet person and a very accepting one, he never gate-kept. I could say, “Andrew, I’m in the church”, and he’d say, “Oh good”, or “I’m gay” and he’d say, “Oh, very good”. What he showed me was a sort of rebellion. When I was younger, I wasn’t allowed to read his books, but it was through him I understood you could write books for a living, that this was an actual, viable option, so he modelled that for me. But what he really modelled was this wonderful lack of shame. He wasn’t afraid to write in different genres, he wasn’t afraid to write about anything.”

It was that glorious shedding of shame, of convention, of fear that allowed Anna McGahan to write Immaculate and it brought her the Vogel.

It also brought publication of the book, through Allen & Unwin, which has, for decades, had publishing rights to the award.

First awarded in 1980 – to Archie Weller, for The Day of the Dog – The Australian/Vogel award has launched or accelerated the careers of some of Australia’s most beloved writers – Tim Winton, Kate Grenville and Gillian Mears among them.

In 1991, Andrew McGahan’s Praise, a book that turned Australian publishing on its head, won. Funny, dry, explicit, laced with sex and drugs and ennui, it was a groundbreaking book, written without shame, without fear of judgment.

Annette Barlow was the publishing head of Allen & Unwin back then, as she is now, and it was Barlow who informed McGahan she had won the 2023 Vogel.

Immaculate by Anna McGahan.

“I had submitted my manuscript and I received an email from Allen & Unwin asking for a meeting. I genuinely didn’t think it was … well I didn’t really know what it was … but I certainly didn’t think it was to tell me I’d won, but I went to their offices and I was just thrilled to be inside this famous publisher’s office.

“I met with Annette and she sat me down and she said, ‘Thirty years ago, I told your Uncle Andrew he had won this award, and today I get to tell you.’”

It was, McGahan says, a moment of utter joy.

Anna McGahan, fearless and bright, writing on.

Originally published as ‘I was grieving’: Actress turned author Anna McGahan on marriage breakdown and family loss