Unreel

The brilliantly funny, achingly nostalgic memoir of a life spent watching and writing, from the award-winning reviewer and bestselling author of Driving to Treblinka.

Born to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and a 1950s Kiwi tradwife too busy to police her viewing, Diana Wichtel cut her teeth on the Golden Age of television. But in the 1960s, things fell apart. Diana's fractured family left Canada and blew into New Zealand, just missing the Beatles, and minus a father.

Diana watched television being born again half a world away, and twenty years later walked into the smoky, clacking offices of the Listener where she became the country's foremost television critic - loved and loathed, with the hate mail in seething capital letters to prove it.

Meanwhile, television's sometimes-pale imitation - her real life - was beginning to unreel.

This is a sharply funny, wise and profound memoir of growing up and becoming a writer, of parents and children, early marriage and divorce, finding love again... and of the box we gathered around in our living rooms that changed the world.

'This whipcrack of a book is such good company that my eyes hurt from smiling as I read it. (Was I smiling, or was it something else?) Here we are, in our audacity, our absurdity, our banality, and our hope. Stumbling towards something now largely past. Linear TV, life, Diana Wichtel herself, none of us are spared, but most of us are forgiven. This has always been Wichtel's brilliance. Her sharp, funny empathy. (She'd be the perfect funeral guest.) She also has the critic's obsession with delivering for the audience, or reader. As stunningly displayed in Driving to Treblinka (read it), her words carry their truths off the page, impatient for our attention. Gorgeous, acerbic, illuminating, human, Unreel is a wonderful read.' - John Campbell

'A funny, wise memoir that's as much about love and loss as it is about telly. The prose is brilliant, hilarious, just right. Devastating too, when the critic looks, clear-eyed, at the individual tragedy suffered by her family that is a stain on the conscience of the world. This story twines the communal joy of the greatest shows - from I Love Lucy to Coro and The Sopranos - with the author's realisation of the power the medium has, not only to bring us together, but to help her face the darkness of the past. Diana Wichtel is watching TV but she sees so much more.' - Noelle McCarthy

'The funniest writer on the planet on the mad, sad and profound joys of the idiot box. You should binge read this.' - Steve Braunias