McNally’s memoir offers up the backstory on his style, and in doing so, it embraces his status as one of New York’s most influential creative minds ... His memoir...will outlast a single evening out. A perfectly orchestrated meal creates the illusion of effortlessness; McNally’s book serves as an enduring reminder of the work and talent that go into creating such memories, and of the artists whose vision sets the scene.
Wry, insightful and vulnerable, a courageous book alive with mordant humor and British irony ... [Displays] appealing honesty ... Mr. McNally writes candidly about his flaws ... In the aftermath of his terrible stroke, he has established himself as a remarkable writer.
Keith McNally’s memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, is driven by his dislikes, as so many good books are ... His book lives up to this credo, in a manner that gives it more soulfulness and more bottom, as the Brits like to call gravitas, than (let’s say) Graydon Carter’s recent memoir.
Reading the memoir is a bit like scrolling through his feed: he’s not really a raconteur, but he’s an energetic collector of rants, vignettes, and curiosities. This isn’t necessarily a strike against the book. If anything, he’s found a new way to give the crowd what it wants.
Rueful, self-aware, chatty, entertaining, dazzling, and harrowing: a book that contains multitudes ... McNally is a charming and honest raconteur who’s lived an impossibly broad-ranging life.
McNally writes vividly of his formative years ... Throughout, McNally makes good on his reputation for unvarnished, sometimes-controversial commentary—at one point, he comes to Woody Allen’s defense—but the intimacy this approach generates makes it more of a feature than a bug. It adds up to an intriguing portrait of a complex personality.
