Reckoning Study Guide

Magda Szubanski was born in 1961 in Liverpool, United Kingdom, to Scottish-Irish mother Margaret and Polish father Peter Szubanski, a former assassin for the Polish Underground Army during World War II. When Szubanski was four years old, the Szubanski family moved to Australia. Szubanski attended Melbourne University and starred in the university revue Too Cool For Sandals, a performance which sparked her acting career. From there, she went on to perform in the sketch comedy shows D-Generation and Fast Forward. In 1995, Szubanski and her friends Jane Turner and Gina Riley wrote, performed, and produced the comedy show Big Girl’s Blouse. Taking their characters from Big Girl’s Blouse, Turner and Riley created the renowned comedy show Kath and Kim, in which Szubanski starred as Sharon Strzlecki, a sports-obsessed tomboy. Szubanski also played Esme Hogget in the film Babe and its sequel, Babe: Pig in the City. In 2009, Szubanski appeared on the ancestry reality show Who Do You Think You Are, which traced her family history in Ireland, Scotland, and Poland. After coming out as gay on a current events TV program, The Project, Szubanski became an advocate for same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ community. In 2015, Szubanski wrote her memoir, Reckoning, which centered on her journey coming to terms with her father’s complicated past and with her own sexuality. Reckoning won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and was named “The Book of the Year” at the Australian Book Industry Awards. For her contributions as an actor, comedian, and writer, Szubanski was appointed an officer of the Order of Australia in 2019.

Reckoning is deeply rooted in the history of World War II. Centered historically in Poland, Reckoning details the Polish Underground Army—a group formed for the purpose of assassinating members of the Gestapo and Gestapo collaborators—and the Warsaw Uprising, which resulted in the near annihilation of Warsaw and its inhabitants. Through describing the conflict between Germany, Poland, and Russia during World War II, Reckoning touches on the Holocaust, immigration, and PTSD and war trauma. Reckoning also delves into Ireland’s history and recounts the poverty there in the early 1900s. From the author’s contemporary standpoint, Reckoning discusses the LGBTQ movement, and the legalization of same-sex marriage.  

In its telling of a woman who hid Jewish families in her Poland home, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel Based on a True Holocaust Story, by J. L. Witterick, strongly resembles Magda’s examination of her father’s childhood growing up in Poland during World War II. Other books that deal with the Holocaust as well as with immigration, and which Szubanski references in Reckoning, are Leon Uris’s Exodus and Miła 18. Like Reckoning, the memoir What We Carry by Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author’s uncovering of a parent’s past—a past that reveals a different person than the author thought she knew. What We Carry also shares with Reckoning the theme of immigration; in particular, it examines how alienating the experience of immigration can be. Also along these lines, Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford, is a woman’s attempt to find who she is in the shadow of her father’s legacy.