This story discusses sexual assault.

Magda Szubanski is a misfit. She knows it, she owns it and she wears it. And that’s why Australians love her.

Best known for her role as netball tragic Sharon Strzelecki on Kath & Kim, Szubanski has twice been voted the country’s most trusted celebrity. But she’s also a formidable author. In 2016, Szubanski’s first memoir, Reckoning, won Best Biography of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards.

Review: I Can’t Tell You But I Will – Magda Szubanski (Text Publishing)

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. “If you had met my father,” the book begins, “you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.”

Szubanski’s new memoir, I Can’t Tell You But I Will, is an ode to her mother, “the love of [her] life”. It traces their tumultuous relationship against the backdrop of her mother’s 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.

It was, Szubanski reflects, “a hard, hard book to write”.

In May 2025, the comedian revealed on Instagram that she had been diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma, a rare and aggressive blood cancer with a high chance of relapse. It is “one of the nasty ones”, she said, though she has since revealed she is in “deep remission”.

In her new book, she writes:

I had begun dying, although I didn’t know it then. My cancer diagnosis […] changed everything — literally. My bone marrow, my mitochondria, my nerves and tendons. I’m still processing it.

I had begun dying, although I didn’t know it then. My cancer diagnosis […] changed everything — literally. My bone marrow, my mitochondria, my nerves and tendons. I’m still processing it.

And in the preface: “I am finishing this book in a world vastly different from the one in which I began it.”

‘A classic case of trauma’

In both her books, Szubanski prises open “the rib cage” of her family history to expose “its beating, bleeding heart”. In I Can’t Tell You But I Will, she names the source of the shame she struggled with in Reckoning.

In August 2019, almost two years after her mother’s death, as the Victorian Court of Appeal upheld Cardinal George Pell’s 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.

“Suddenly, everything makes sense,” Szubanski writes. “On 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.”

In the following pages, Szubanski discloses that she, too, is a victim of childhood sexual abuse:

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’t remember how many times it happened, but I know it was many times over the course of years.

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’t remember how many times it happened, but I know it was many times over the course of years.

“How can something happen to you that you don’t understand?” Szubanski asks. “Why are we so........

© The Conversation