Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
~ George Orwell
Keith McNally’s autobiography I Regret Almost Everything begins with a quote from the patron saint of the fearlessly honest.
McNally himself does not skimp on failures and disgraces. In his book, he recounts numerous business failures and costly oversights, a suicide attempt, and the many embarrassments and debilities he faced after having a stroke in his mid-sixties.
The work resembles an artist’s autobiography, in which the subject narrates his triumphs and defeats, his influences, the slow development of his sensorium and his craft, his inability to function in the workaday world, and his hatred of bourgeois convention.
But McNally is not widely known as an artist. What he is famous for is his extraordinary success and longevity as a New York-based restaurateur. (I…
