Kate Cantrell, Senior Lecturer of Humanities at the University of Southern Queensland, shared on LinkedIn:
“In a recent conversation with the ABC’s Richard Fidler, Magda Szubanski revealed that she is in deep remission and that, although she feels ‘strong in spirit’, she is ‘physically knackered’.
‘Cancer completely changes everything,’ she said. ‘One is the uncertainty, the fear of relapse … and then there’s the other thing of not much time for bullshit, because cancer is a full-time job.’
Szubanski is no stranger to cancer: it shadowed her family long before her diagnosis in 2025. Her father was 41 when he was diagnosed with a soft-tissue sarcoma: ‘a tumour the size of a man’s fist’ in the back of his left thigh. He survived and lived for decades more. A year after his death, Magda’s mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a disease that ‘often dispatches its victims within a matter of months’.
‘Grave illness is the only language my family understands,’ Szubanski writes. ‘What our mouths dare not say our bodies will speak. Somatisation is the technical term.’
It was not until her mother took seven long days to die – and Szubanski watched as ‘the stubborn engine of [her mother’s] body jolts and sputters’ – that she realised what humour truly is: a form of grace.
Szubanski’s writing meditates on what we owe ourselves and the dead. She exposes the fantasy that our lives are stable, predictable, and containable. Cancer shatters this illusion, revealing that we depend on one another to survive and that, in the end, the beauty and brutality of living – ‘the real stuff of life’ – makes misfits of us all.
My review of Magda Szubanski’s incredible new memoir, I Can’t Tell You But I Will.
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