From a New York Times story by Alexandra Jacobs headlined “For a Literary Man’s Man, Mother Knew Best”:

The magazine eminence Terry McDonell’s first memoir, “The Accidental Life,” was a collection of career-centered anecdotes that felt banged out with two fingers on an Olivetti typewriter. Each started with a word count and finished like a sock to the jaw with the insiderly journalistic term “ENDIT.” Reviewing that book in 2016, my colleague Dwight Garner noted that it was “light on female personages,” adding that the author wasn’t “opening his vault or baring his soul.”