There is a certain tension in the celebrity memoir between what is confessed and what is withheld. We want to know the things the celebrity isn’t telling us, and comb through what they do say looking for secrets, the flaws or inconsistencies, the myopic and self-serving. Most celebrities try to thread their stories through this needle, giving us the sense of candidness without revealing too much of anything. After all, there are reputations to uphold.
Magda Szubanski doesn’t write those memoirs. She writes about her life with such emotional precision, like a forensic pathologist wielding a scalpel; never aiming for amiability nor belly laughs, but a kind of equilibrium of understanding instead. She processes the tectonic forces in her life in order to stand on firmer ground, like building a mound on which to better survey the topography. I Can’t Tell You But I Will is the follow-up to her 2015 memoir Reckoning, about her father and the scars of war; this memoir turns the attention away from him and on to her mother, Margaret.
Mother-daughter relationships often make for fascinating reading, as we saw recently with Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me. There’s something about the intensity and ruthlessness of familial female dynamics that feels particularly brutal and bruising, and Szubanski doesn’t shy away from the ways in which mothers can get under the skin and into the fibres of our being. Margaret is a flinty Scotswoman with a mean streak – Szubanski often emphasises the word “mean” in a way that lets you feel every slight and insult – but she’s also complex and loving. I Can’t Tell You is less a reckoning and more a painfully earned benediction.
That seems appropriate, given a key theme in the memoir is Szubanski’s religion. Raised Catholic, she struggled with the strictures and the doctrine of Christianity while finding comfort in its rituals (“Rituals matter more than clever secular people like to admit,” she writes) and sense of tribalism. Being a lesbian made this relationship with the church untenable while opening her to a new tribe; witnessing friends in beautiful same-sex relationships, she realised the dogma was plain wrong. When she first had sex with a woman, “I knew, despite what I had been told my whole life, that this was not an unnatural act. That while it might be a sin against the Church it was definitely not a sin against nature.”
I Can’t Tell You employs and entwines two narrative arcs: Margaret’s long, awful decline and death, and Szubanski’s public activism in the fight for marriage equality. Ambivalence runs through both. It’s fascinating to learn of the doubt and insecurity Szubanski felt as the voice of the Yes campaign – and appalling to learn of the hatred and vitriol she endured – given her status as one of Australia’s most beloved people, with an Order of Australia to her name: “This is an ideological gun fight, and I have come armed with a butter knife. My ‘popularity’.”
Szubanski’s reticence about getting involved with activism of any kind stems from her time working at a women’s refuge, where she experienced the remorseless consequences of domestic violence as well as the excruciating internal politics of the feminist collective that ran it. She may have found the experience traumatising, but it presumably helped in the latter campaign, which culminated with an appearance on Q&A that made her opponents seem petty and the Yes campaign dignified and warm.
Contrasting with the victorious story of Szubanski’s return to activism – told without a hint of triumphalism, but rather a weary sense of accomplishment – is Margaret’s decline and her daughter’s profound experience in caring for her at the end of her life. It’s sometimes embittered but also honest and generous, a portrait of people loving imperfectly but passionately and without regret.
There is a sense over the course of these two memoirs that Szubanski is exorcising the spirits of her mother and father – and of ennobling them in the act of writing them down – in order to better understand herself and her place in the world. “Both my parents had such powerful personalities that I had always needed to fight for psychic space, even within my own head,” she writes.
Two things are missing, or at least touched on so briefly they leave a gap or ellipsis. Given half the book is dedicated to Australia’s vote in favour of same-sex marriage, the single mention of the subsequent Indigenous voice to parliament vote and the racism it fostered feels slightly avoidant. Perhaps Szubanski didn’t feel she could speak to that. The other is her cancer diagnosis last year, which she most likely doesn’t feel like discussing right now, even while in remission.
It could be argued that Szubanski’s new book isn’t a celebrity memoir at all. The handful of famous names that crop up aren’t emphasised or mined for their reflected glamour; the heroes are named Clint or Narelle, and backstage stories from her hit shows are completely absent. If anything, it is anti-celebrity, keen to highlight the expansiveness and grit of anonymous people dedicated to “unhistoric acts”. I Can’t Tell You But I Will is, like Reckoning, an insightful and deeply elegant window into aspects of Szubanski we rarely get to see, even if they’re not the ones we may have been expecting.
I Can’t Tell You But I Will by Magda Szubanski is out now in Australia (Text Publishing, $55), with wider release to follow
