Unreel: A memoir

(Paperback)

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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.

Author Bio

Diana Wichtel is a revered name in New Zealand letters. She is the author of Driving to Treblinka (Awa Press), which won the Royal Society Te Aparangi Award for General Non-fiction at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Born in 1950 in Vancouver, Wichtel's mother, Patricia, was a New Zealander; her father, Benjamin Wichtel, a Polish Jew who escaped from the Nazi train taking his family to the Treblinka extermination camp in World War II. When she was 13 her mother brought her to New Zealand to live, along with her two siblings. They never saw her father again. Wichtel was appointed staff writer at the New Zealand Listener in 1984 and has won many awards for her television criticism, profiles and feature writing. She was still writing for the Listener when its then publisher announced the magazine's closure in April 2020. The New Zealand Herald's weekend magazine Canvas welcomed Wichtel as a fortnightly columnist in October 2020.