New York, New York: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. A trio of new memoirs embody the fantasy—and the reality—of strivers who come to leave a mark in the city’s most glamorous industries.

As a young man coming of age in Canada, Graydon Carter enumerated things that would give him happiness. Number One: “Living in New York. Greenwich Village, specifically.” Number Two: “Becoming the editor of a big, general-interest magazine.” When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures in the Last Golden Age of Magazines, written with James Fox (Penguin Press, March 25), is the story of how he achieved those goals, first at the satirical magazine Spy, and then at the king of celebrity glossies, Vanity Fair.

The book is chock-full of good anecdotes, but none better captures the mercurial nature of the magazine world than Carter’s arrival at Condé Nast, the magazine company where he’d been offered the editorship of the New Yorker, only to learn at the last minute—via a phone call from Vogue editor Anna Wintour—that chairman Si Newhouse was moving him over to VF instead. “Act surprised when he tells you,” Wintour advised. There’s never a dull moment in this lively memoir.

Restaurateur Keith McNally was born into a working-class family in the East End of London; he arrived in New York in 1975 with “vague plans of making films” but instead landed a gig shucking oysters at a fashionable restaurant called One Fifth. As chronicled in his blunt and entertaining memoir,  I Regret Almost Everything (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, May 6), he’d go on to open such legendary Manhattan eateries as Odeon (immortalized on the cover of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City), Lucky Strike, Café Luxembourg, and Balthazar, the downtown brasserie where supermodels and pop stars rubbed elbows with artists and film directors.

There’s plenty of dish in these pages—John Belushi cooked hamburgers for adoring Odeon staff after hours; Patti Smith was “incredibly rude to the servers” at One Fifth—but also some introspection. McNally suffered a debilitating stroke in 2017 and later tried to commit suicide; he’s painfully honest about the challenges of his life now. He’s also terrific company.

Designer Prabal Gurung came from even farther afield—he grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, bullied for his effeminacy, and studied at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi before enrolling at the Parsons School of Design in New York in 1999. “The New York hustle, at least for immigrants with brown skin, was real,” he writes in Walk Like a Girl (Viking, May 13), recounting his apprenticeships at Cynthia Rowley and Bill Blass, as well as the hurdles he faced as a person of color in a very white industry. But he has talent and just enough insouciance—wearing flip-flops to a meeting with Wintour at Vogue—that he’s able to launch his own line, a “hey kids, let’s put on a show” presentation during New York Fashion Week that lands the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. Soon he’s dressing Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Zoe Saldaña. New York dreams really do come true.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.