‘I Regret Almost Everything' Review: Keith McNally Serves Up Memories

Wall Street Journal

23-05-2025

In 2016 Keith McNally had a beautiful wife, five children, a home in London and a thriving empire of eight fashionable restaurants in New York City. One morning in November that year, his world was overturned: He was gripped by a horrific metallic tingling 'like some malignant jellyfish' that clasped itself onto his face. Hours later he woke up in a London hospital. Mr. McNally had suffered a stroke that left his speech slurred and his right side paralyzed. 'Overnight I was confined to a wheelchair and deprived of language.' The loss of words and physical control left him feeling 'buried alive.' His speech returned in days, but the episode catapulted him into an emotional and marital crisis. Within two years, he would attempt suicide with an overdose of pills.
Mr. McNally's autobiography, 'I Regret Almost Everything,' is wry, insightful and vulnerable, a courageous book alive with mordant humor and British irony. At the beginning of the book Mr. McNally quotes George Orwell. '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.' Mr. McNally doesn't spare himself: failed marriages, business misfires, his mercurial relationship with his brother Brian (with whom he had a fight that ended with a broken cheekbone) are all confronted with appealing honesty.
The elegantly frayed patrician style of Mr. McNally's restaurants owes nothing to his background. He was born in 1951 in Bethnal Green, a London neighborhood that was solidly working class in those days. The McNally family lived in a one-story prefab, and he played with his friends in dirt-filled craters left by Luftwaffe bombs. His father was a waterfront laborer and an amateur boxer, his mother an office cleaner who read obsessively and considered herself socially above her husband. Their 'grim and joyless' marriage lasted years and produced four children.
Mr. McNally's opportunity for escape came after he left school at 16. He took a job as a bellhop at the Hilton Park Lane hotel, where he was spotted by a guest who offered him a role as a street urchin in a film. Mr. McNally became a fledgling actor, appearing in the satirist Alan Bennett's 1968 play 'Forty Years On' in the West End. After the play's run ended, he began an affair with Mr. Bennett, who was 17 years his senior. McNally had just turned 18. The liaison lasted until Mr. McNally came to America in 1975 with vague plans for making films of his own.