I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING

Memoir by the famed restaurateur of a life expansively lived.

McNally opens on a distinctly dour note, with a suicide attempt that didn’t take. “There was a time where everything worked,” he writes. He’d been happily married, owned eight restaurants in Manhattan and had more in the works, and had bags full of money. Then he had a devastating stroke, “confined to a wheelchair and deprived of language.” Robbed of the use of his right hand, he would learn to become a southpaw, as he puts it, and “there’s something ruggedly appealing about the word ‘southpaw.’” There’s much here about the physiology and psychology of strokes and about the involving world of restaurants and the, pardon, dish surrounding them; it was McNally who outed TV celebrity James Corden for an episode of ill manners, for instance, which he now regrets: “For someone who’s hyperconscious of humiliation since suffering a stroke, it now seems monstrous that I didn’t consider the humiliation I was subjecting Corden to.” McNally also writes of the ins and outs of the restaurant business as business, leveraging huge numbers of dollars at Vegas odds with the possibility of losing everything while working with people you might not want to; as he writes of one such person, “You can’t form a partnership with a pit bull and then be shocked when he bites you.” But more than all that, McNally is a charming and honest raconteur who’s lived an impossibly broad-ranging life, acting, directing, traveling the world, spending time with some of the greats in the film and theatrical business (even if, as he writes in anguish, he once failed to seat Ingrid Bergman because he didn’t recognize her). On top of everything else, McNally celebrates New York City, where he once was a king but now is quite content simply to call it home.

Rueful, self-aware, chatty, entertaining, dazzling, and harrowing: a book that contains multitudes.