Unreel: A memoir

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 in to 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 – real life – unreeled.

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.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Imprint: Penguin Books NZ
Publication date: 26/11/2024