Unreel: A Life in Review

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.