Unreel

Description

Title: Unreel: A Life in Review
Author: Diana Wichtel
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2024
Format: Trade Paperback
Condition: Very Good

Longlisted, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2025.

Description:

Her father was a Polish Holocaust survivor who escaped from a Nazi train bound for Treblinka. Her mother was a 1950s Kiwi tradwife too busy to police her daughter’s viewing. Between the two of them, Diana Wichtel got a very specific education in the twentieth century — most of it gleaned from the television set.

In the 1960s, her fractured family left Canada and blew into New Zealand, just missing the Beatles, and minus a father. She watched television being born all over again, half a world away. Twenty years later, she walked into the smoky, clacking offices of the NZ Listener and became — as the back cover has it — “the country’s foremost television critic, loved and loathed, with the hate mail in seething capital letters to prove it.”

Unreel is Diana Wichtel’s memoir — but it is not, at its heart, a book about television. It is a book about what television helped her survive: the absence of a father, the unspoken weight of history, the particular texture of a New Zealand life built in the shadow of something vast. The TV criticism is the frame; the life is the subject. Steve Braunias called her “the funniest writer on the planet on the mad, sad and profound joys of the idiot box” — and he’s not wrong. But Noelle McCarthy saw the other thing too: “Diana Wichtel is watching TV but she sees so much more.”

John Campbell put it this way: “Her sharp, funny empathy. (She’d be the perfect funeral guest.)”

Unreel was longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards General Non-Fiction prize. Wichtel’s previous book, Driving to Treblinka, won the same award in 2018. This is what a second book looks like when the first one already said the hardest thing.

Why We Stock It:

Diana Wichtel is one of the most distinctive voices in NZ journalism — a critic whose subject was always, at some level, how we live with each other and what we gather around together. The Listener she walked into in 1984 is gone now; the broadcasting world she described is mostly gone. Unreel is the account of both, and of the life behind the byline. The Gravy was made to carry books like this.