‘A hard, hard book to write’: Magda Szubanski on trauma, cancer and the cost of coming out

Darren James/Text Publishing 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.