Magda Szubanski’s memoir reveals a woman of substance

Every library should have a copy of Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning: A Memoir, and every school should teach it.

Australian actress and comedian Magda Szubanski in Melbourne. Picture: Nathan Dyer

It is decades since Magda Szubanski established herself as one of the great figures of Australian comedy. From the early days of The D-Generation and Fast Forward, through the barrier-breaking Big Girl’s Blouse to the dazzling ordinariness of her Sharon Strzelecki in Kath & Kim, Magda is one of those extraordinary comedians in whose case the line between sketch comedy and character acting, as well as between laughter and some undreamt-of poignancy, gets hard to draw.

She has made Hollywood hits such as Babe, been the face of Jenny Craig, and is adored by the Australian public. And through it all there has been the uncanny sense of a clown of ­genius that makes most forms of intellectualism look like a feeble, fluttering thing.

Now she has written a memoir that will dazzle every kind of reader because it is a driven, utterly serious book (whatever incidental laughs there may be in it) because it is in a central way about Szubanski’s quest for her father and the enigma of a moral and historical inheritance he bequeathed to her like a tragic hero’s curse on the house that inherited him.

Her Polish father was a war hero; her Polish father was an assassin. We begin as he lies dying and Magda gets her father, who has always been insouciant about religion, to see a Polish priest, and her father is not derisive of him and admits the man is not an idiot. The priest preaches at his funeral and says that God is the only true biographer.

An old lady tells Magda — and who would disbelieve her? — that her father was the bravest of the brave.

He defended Jewish children and Polish people when he was barely an adult. He escaped from Poland in the total darkness of a sewer, feeling the crunch of corpses beneath his feet. And yes, he killed people, sufferers of whatever frailty flesh is heir to, in his fight against the Nazis. And so the question rises like the smoke of sacrifice: if evil is done to you, if evil is to be struggled against, are we justified in doing evil in return? Or is that too portentous a term for the justice of war?

This is the question that hovers and broods over the whole of Szubanski’s Reckoning, even though it is predominantly the story of her life (and in part her brilliant career). And it complicates it and gives it a weird, unearthly moral profundity as well as an odd, slightly unhinged detective-story quality as Magda, like the Miss Marple of her own moral bewilderments, crosses the world over and over as she tries to come to terms with where she comes from and, therefore, who she is.

Her father emigrated to Britain and from there to Australia. He put the dark matter of Poland, God’s fatal playground, behind him. He smiled, without sentimentality, at the world. He pushed his daughter into sports, into tennis, he tried — and seems to have succeeded — in making her into a warrior in the sense of someone who would be ready for whatever battle the soul might have to face.

In practice, much of Reckoning is preoccupied with the splendours and the miseries of growing up in outer-suburban Croydon, Victoria; of Szubanski doing her best to master the idiom of becoming a sharpie chick; and of her days at the Catholic girls school Siena College, miles away in sedate Camberwell.

There are descriptions of a troubled nun who would arrange the girls in a particular visual pattern and go haywire when they malevolently changed that pattern whenever she turned her back. There are also the wise, compassionate nuns, the male teachers who cast her in Salad Days and taught her literature and, in one instance, let her down unforgettably.

Szubanski realises early on that to be a performer is some kind of destiny for her but this is never separate from an ongoing quest for answers or peace, for whatever wisdom might be going. She realises pretty fast that she’s fearfully attracted to her own sex, though she also dallies with boys — and there are a hundred witty, sidelong descriptions of every aspect of life that are funny and utterly vivid and believable. Even though Reckoning is at every point a seeker’s book and a serious book because it is only incidentally an autobiography, we are always in the middle of the journey, in a dark wood, whatever leopard of deliciousness or starved wolf of the will to power lopes into view.

At every point there is a strong enriching sense of family. Of the tough, cynical imperviousness of the author’s father who is also the voice of a conscience that shadows everything like a nemesis. But then there’s the author’s Scottish mother, with her laughter and her toughness and her sudden floods of emotion and her closely guarded vulnerabilities.

It’s a panorama of a world of vibrant, struggling souls Szubanski evokes in this memoir and it has an intense, inward vividness in its extended moments of drama.

Everyone will want to read it for the story of the life. How Szubanski meets Marg Downey and those musketeers of comic mayhem, Gina Riley and Jane Turner. No one will be disappointed by the easygoing sense of anecdote. Szubanski says Riley had her sized up as a snob and she had Riley down as an insufferable show-off, and they were both right. But they couldn’t resist each other because their friendship formed when Riley was ringing up after a boyfriend but constantly found herself talking to Szubanski instead.

There’s an utterly assured sense of social reference. Sacre Coeur was the classier Catholic girls school that fed the comic lunacy of Downey and Turner. And Szubanski is wonderfully wise when she says the accusation that they were inner-urban latte sippers sneering at suburban people was nonsense, the women behind Kath & Kim were suburban to their back teeth and that’s why millions loved the show, because they were laughing at themselves.

So you can read Reckoning as an account of how Szubanski and her brilliant friends made the transition of creating a remarkably original female form of Australian comedy. All of this stuff is as engrossing, as worldly and as witty as the earlier accounts of suburban striving and sniping and sexual longing. But then there’s the genealogy of morals at the heart of this book. The journeys to Poland — under communism, the ghastliness of a world without the icons of advertising — and the human richness of Szubanski’s Polish family: of her aunt Danuta and her memories of the journey and the pity of war. Of her cousin Magda Zawadzka and her husband Gustaw Holoubeck, who are the Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh of Poland.

And at one point, in parallel, the television show Who Do You Think You Are? sends her to Ireland, a place she has always dreaded, the land of her mother’s father, who she discovers was in prison on the Western Front of World War I. And there’s an understated warning from Szubanski’s mother not to reduce her grandfather to a cartoon of victimhood. The book is full of this kind of thing as well as Szubanski’s glimpsed murmurs of the heart with women, but there is the abiding preoccupation of moral courage and of the soul’s destiny.

Reckoning is an utterly unusual book because it is palpably the work of a woman who is constantly presenting herself as on the edge, forever theorising her way through the dumbfounding questions of what matters, who is also the stricken possessor of a tremendous sense of drama. There is a moment where she describes witnessing a fire and a man on fire in the street where she lives. And she does it with staggering force while also indicating, almost as an allegorical tracing, how hard it is to act.

There are fugitive and abiding fears throughout Reckoning. And there is also the saga of how Szubanski finally had the courage to come out as a lesbian. There is the strongest possible sense — unmistakably Catholic, for all the surrounding Buddhist and agnostic trimmings — of what does it profit a person to gain the world at the cost of their immortal soul.

But there is also what the Dalai Lama tells her: maximum affection is always best.

Reckoning is a riveting, overwhelmingly poignant autobiography by a woman of genius. It is a book about how someone might live with the idea of killing the thing they love. It is a story of love and death and redemption and a daughter’s love for her father. It is an extraordinary hymn to the tragic heroism at the heart of ordinary life and the soaring moral scrutiny of womankind. Every library should have it, every school should teach it.

Peter Craven was founding editor of Quarterly Essay.

Reckoning: A Memoir

By Magda Szubanski

Text Publishing, 400pp, $49.99