How I Review: Madeleine Chapman

In the third edition of how I review, an interview with journalist and author Madeleine Chapman.

Madeleine Chapman is a journalist and author. She is the former editor of The Spinoff (2021-2025), and her books include Steven Adams: My Life My Fight and Jacinda Ardern: A Different Kind of Leader. She has won several journalism awards, including Best (Single) News Story /Scoop and Best Opinion Writer (Humour/Satire) at the Voyager Media Awards.

So how did you come to the practice of reviewing?

I came to it in the same way that lots of people do, which is having an interest in something, seeing it either represented or seeing that practice being done and then having thoughts about it.

If I went right back, I grew up in a house with lots of people and most of them were older and smarter than I was, and so everything that I consumed, art-wise, had already been consumed by someone else, and often I would have an opinion on it, and they would go, “Mm. I don’t agree, I think actually this book was pretty bad.”

Then, me as a twelve year old would go, “I thought it was really great.”

It was almost getting these quick exposures to conflicting opinions of things from when I was very young and having to kind of square my own thoughts with someone else disagreeing and going, “Do I actually maybe agree with them now because of what they’ve shared with me?” or did we just have a completely different experience of this.

I’ve always been happy to disagree about things and how I have viewed them.

In terms of actually reviewing something, strangely the experience I had was starting at The Spinoff as an intern, having zero feature writing or reporting experience at all. Maybe the first thing I ever wrote for The Spinoff that was paid for was a review of a reality TV show where parents and their kids had to renovate a house together. It was pretty bad.

The only reason I felt that I could review is that I had just renovated a house with my parents. It wasn’t a TV interest or a medium interest, it was that I had just lived it, and I wanted to see how close that TV show was to my lived experience. Which is a whole genre of reviewing. 

It was probably quite terribly written, but I was positive about some parts, and quite critical of the show for how it was structured. That was the first review I ever wrote that got published. Then for a long time, that was how I reviewed things. “This is somewhat relevant to me as a person, so I will review this subject matter rather than the artform.”

I think that’s probably how lots of people get into reviewing. There was a lot of “Oh here is a show with Pacific people in it” so I will as the one Pacific writer review that one. I wrote some badly written reviews, but I think any time I had a thought about something, It was then encouraged that I would write the thought.

Then maybe a year in, I worked with Simon Wilson, who obviously had decades of reviewing experience. I reviewed two restaurants with him, it was literally called The Critic and the Rookie. We reviewed The Grove, which is obviously a fine dining restaurant. I, to this day, would not feel qualified to review food – restaurant food – at all.

But because that was the whole point, that I was not qualified to review this restaurant but was going to review it anyway, it was very heartening that we wrote each of our reviews completely separately and we basically came to the same conclusion. He came to it writing how restaurant reviews are written, which is a very specific kind of writing, and I wrote it in a very plain English style.

We basically had the same opinion of the restaurant, it was just presented very differently. It was very fun, and a lot of people read the review and kind of went, “Oh, it’s interesting to see that someone who can’t and probably shouldn’t review fine dining restaurants can still agree and share the same thought or approach as a very seasoned restaurant critic.”

That was a real boost in terms of basically, you don’t have to be a qualified reviewer to have review-worthy opinions, it’s about learning how to communicate those in the review form in a way that is helpful to the reader, and even helpful to the people you are reviewing.