The first thing I notice when I meet Magda Szubanski is her smile. Warm, open and friendly, it lights up the room. We meet at the Radisson Blu Bloomsbury, in London, where she has just finished a book tour of the UK.
Reckoning is not a celebrity tell-all memoir. It’s about family, history and love. She says: “I’ve never been interested in my own life story, but the story of how our lives are impacted by our ancestors and how we are all impacted by intergenerational trauma.”
Not the lightest of topics for an autobiography, Magda’s journey of selfdiscovery from a suburban childhood haunted by the demons of her father’s wartime secrets in Poland, reveal for the first time the suffering underneath the bubbly public persona. In seeking to understand how he was affected by his past, Magda considers the role of silence in his life – and how it came to affect hers.