On Living with Television

“This book is a stunning achievement. In prose that is as graceful as it is compassionate, Amy Holdsworth gives voice to the unseen scenarios of care and relationality that television enters every day. How we watch television, she shows us, is how we anchor ourselves to places and people, and how we learn to be alone. Television creates space for holding our struggles and restores our capacities in ways that go beyond simply coping. This once-in-a-decade book reinvents the methods and language of television studies.” - Anna McCarthy, author of The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America

“In this wonderfully innovative book, Amy Holdsworth explores television as a lifelong companion that intersects with ordinary habits, affects, and caretaking in the home. Combining her personal experience with a brilliant pursuit of questions that cross interdisciplinary fields, Holdsworth shows how television relates to embodied practices of everyday time and resonates in memories across the life cycle. Beautifully written with passion, this is feminist television scholarship at its best!” - Lynn Spigel, author of TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life

"An emotionally moving page–turner, this book had this reviewer finishing it in a single sitting–a claim one does not generally apply to academic texts. . . . With sharp textual analysis and even sharper autobiographical writing, the author draws on theoretical work from film and television studies, disability studies, feminist studies, queer studies, autoethnography, and life writing. Scholars across all these areas of study will find much to absorb in this text, which deserves a place alongside the classics of television studies. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals." - S. Pepper, Choice

"A landmark book that will undoubtedly be a foundational text and a catalyst for further research, On Living with Television offers its reader a much-needed alternate perspective on what it means to watch and live with television." - Leanne Weston, Critical Studies in Television