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.
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.
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.
