Summary
Winner, Australian Book Industry Book of the Year 2016
Heartbreaking, joyous, traumatic, intimate and revelatory, Reckoning is the book where Magda Szubanski, one of Australia's most beloved performers, tells her story.
In this extraordinary memoir, Magda describes her journey of self-discovery from a suburban childhood, haunted by the demons of her father's espionage activities in wartime Poland and by her secret awareness of her sexuality, to the complex dramas of adulthood and her need to find out the truth about herself and her family. With courage and compassion she addresses her own frailties and fears, and asks the big questions about life, about the shadows we inherit and the gifts we pass on.
Honest, poignant, utterly captivating, Reckoning announces the arrival of a fearless writer and natural storyteller. It will touch the lives of its readers.
Author Notes
Magdalene Mary "Magda" Szubanski was born April 12,1961 in Liverpool, England. She is an Australian actress, comedian, television and radio personality, and writer. Her career began while she was studying at university and she progressed to television sketch comedy, as both a writer and performer. She has performed in the comedy programs The D-Generation and Fast Forward; more recently, she stars as Sharon Strzelecki in the television comedy show Kath & Kim. Szubanski portrayed Esme Hoggett in the film Babe and its sequel Babe: Pig in the City. Her first book, Reckoning: A Memoir, won the 2016 Indie Book Awards Best Nonfiction award, the Australian Booksellers Association Booksellers Choice Award, the 2016 Victorian Community History Awards Judges¿ Special Prize and the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards named it Best Book of the Year and Biography of the year.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Excerpts
'If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin. Warmhearted, friendly, engaging, intelligent, genial, generous, humorous, honourable, affectionate, arrogant, blunt, loyal. He was a family man. He was handsome, although he did not have heroic stature. He was 5'4". He was stylish, fashion-conscious; a dandy even. He also looked incredibly young for his age. In his seventies he took to wearing his baseball cap backwards and, believe it or not, he carried it off.
He loved tennis, he loved ballet, he loved good conversation. Out there in the Melbourne suburbs--mowing the lawn in his terry-towelling hat and his Bombay Bloomers; in the lounge room doing the samba at cocktail parties; late at night playing his harmonica in the seclusion of the laundry--you would never have guessed that he was capable of killing in cold blood. But he was. Poor bastard.
He was born in 1924. He was a boy of fifteen when Hitler invaded his homeland and the war began, and as soon as he was able he joined the fighting. All through our growing up he would say, 'I was judge, jury, and executioner.' And I could never imagine--cannot imagine even now--what it feels like to have that responsibility, that guilt. To be a little god with a gun, and the power over life and death.
He spent the rest of his life trying to come to terms with what he had done. I grew up in the shadow of that reckoning.
In the Museo del Prado there is a painting by Hieronymous Bosch called The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, painted around 1494. In the fifteenth century itinerant 'surgeons' offered relief from the scourge of insanity by performing trepannation. They would cut a hole in the patient's skull and then remove what they called the 'stone of madness'. Astonishingly, many people survived.
I swear sometimes I can feel that stone in my head. A palpable presence, an unwelcome thing that I want to squeeze out of my skull like a plum pip, using nothing but the sheer pressure of thought and concentration. If I just think hard enough...
That stone was my father's legacy to me, his keepsake. Beneath his genial surface, somewhere in the depths, I would sometimes catch a glimpse--of a white, smooth, bone-coloured stone. A stone made of calcified guilt and shame. I could feel it.
I can feel it still.'
Excerpted from Reckoning by Magda Szubanski All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
