She’s loved by millions of Australians but in her darkest moment, Magda Szubanski chose to be on her own

In 2025, before Szubanski faced that life-changing diagnosis, she dealt with crippling pain and disturbing, vivid dreams that repeatedly pulled her out of sleep. “They kept waking me up in the middle of the night going, ‘There’s something really wrong.’ My body was obviously on alert,” she says. “And then a few months before [the diagnosis], the dream started saying, ‘You’re dying, you’re dying.’ ”

Szubanski pushed her doctors for more tests. When the results came in, the conversation was short and to the point. She was on her own. “There were a number of people I could have taken with me, but I don’t know, sometimes I’m quite independent,” she says. “I went in and she said, ‘Well, there is something there.’ I said, ‘Is it cancer?’ She said, ‘Yes, it’s cancer.’ ”

As Szubanski began to grasp the seriousness of her particular cancer – an incurable, relapsing lymphoma – “that it might be just a matter of ... if it wasn’t going to be months, but maybe years, not that long. I went into shock,” she says. “I immediately started texting and she’s telling me the thing and I’m texting my friends.”

And then she did what she always does in a challenging situation: she called Marg. “I just remember saying, ‘Oh no, no.’ She was just incredibly open about it,” Downey says, “and she said, ‘Look, Marg, it’s not one of the good ones.’ And she didn’t know how long she would have or whether the treatment was going to work. I think she had to do a deep dive into how she was going to handle it and what treatment she would go with.”

Such experiences profoundly reframe a friendship. They also reshape your sense of what really matters in life. “We talk about death, we talk about dying, we talk about our thoughts about what might be beyond this life,” Downey says. “Going through something like Magda is going through has really made us discuss issues that we wouldn’t have even dreamt about when we were young or when we were at university, having to confront all sorts of pretty heavy stuff.”

Has Downey contemplated her life without Szubanski’s friendship in it? “I have,” she says. “That would be an incredibly sad time because I think Magda knows me better than most people – not every single secret, but she’s across most things – and to have that shared history since childhood is pretty special.” She would also miss the laughter. “There aren’t many people, I don’t know whether you feel this – but where you have a sort of shorthand with one another and one word can trigger hysterical laughter or a ‘remember that?’. We have so many shared memories.”

When Szubanski told the Campbells, the trio made the decision not to conceal anything from the children. “[We’ve] always been as honest as possible,” Lisa says. “The way that she’s been able to describe [the diagnosis and the treatment] to us has been so helpful for us to understand. And that clarity has been great for our kids to understand, too.”

Szubanski found her own understanding by pouring her thoughts and emotions into her manuscript. A line in the foreword notes: “writing the book will force me to look at things I don’t want to see and remember things.”

“It’s not a biography, it’s a memoir, but it’s about the sort of feelings of things,” she says. “And so there’s some stuff that I talk about, especially towards the end, that’s extremely painful. A little bit of me is like, ‘Jesus, girl, you got cancer, do you really need to make yourself feel those feelings?’ But my natural instinct is just to blab the truth, and I say that from the get-go.”

So, I ask Szubanski, where are we today? We have friends in common and I have followed, at least indirectly, her health journey in some detail. For a time, there was chemotherapy and crushing fatigue. Now, as we are talking, the sparkling, instinctively hilarious Magda we know and love is very much in the room. The same week as our interview, she is in the studio recording the audiobook. And I’m aware she’s only just fighting fit and will need to rest at some point.

The short answer is this: the median rate for relapse is four years, depending on potential treatments, and the median survival rate is about eight or nine years. “But that’s improving [and] honestly, it can change at any time. It’s definitely going to shorten my life. It could shorten it quite significantly. I don’t know. If I get to 75, I’ll be bloody thrilled, but if I get to 70, I’ll also be thrilled. But for the moment, touch wood, achieved deep remission.”

And the laughter isn’t going to stop. As we talk, our conversation shifts into my quoting old D-Generation and Fast Forward sketches, the lines of which have never left me. One sketch – about a stressed mother and daughter fighting in the kitchen during a family dinner – sends Szubanski into fits of giggles. It’s a 40-year-old sketch, and still as funny as it was back then. She wrote it, she reveals. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, tense family meals are in her wheelhouse.

One interesting effect of Szubanski’s public health journey is that people have perhaps finally met the real woman behind the punchlines, says Downey. “She has a lot of depth. She’s incredibly intelligent, but she can laugh at herself. She’s self-deprecating, but she’s a very strong person.

“She’s coming at this illness with great intelligence and great integrity and great poise and great bravery, actually. Once upon a time, people probably thought, ‘She’s hilarious, she’s funny.’ But now I feel as though the tide is turning a bit and people are beginning to realise that she’s far more than just a funny person.”

And in her inner world, Szubanski says she is happy. Single, but very happy. Which begs the question: would she like to fall in love again? “At the moment, I’m not probably quite in that headspace, but never say never,” Szubanski says, with a smile.

“I’m completely open to it, but I’m also really happy. I have a great life, which I appreciate incredibly now in the most complete and comprehensive way. I have terrific friends and family. I have a lot of love in my life, so I’m having a good time.”

I Can’t Tell You But I Will by Magda Szubanski (Text Publishing) is out September 29.

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