I Can’t Tell You But I Will by Magda Szubanski review – an insightful, elegant, anti-celebrity memoir

Szubanski’s latest book delves into both her mother’s decline, and her triumphant fight for marriage equality

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.