How lucky we all are that David Lynch has put forth a memoir and that it’s full of everything you’d ever want to know. While there are documentaries and plenty of “interview” books about him, this lengthy tome brings a long awaited addition to my DL section of my bookshelf. Hopefully we will see more books by this master in the near future.

Interesting format: biography and autobiography in one - alternating chapters, first from McKenna based on her research and interviews, then following from Lynch, with his memories of the same time and events. Aside from his movies, I didn't know much about David Lynch, and it was cool reading about his surprisingly serendipitous life (though he's a bit of a narcissistic jerk when it comes to women, surprise surprise). I do wish there would've been more information on where Lynch came up with his ideas.

Even being a fan of David Lynch's films, I wasn't prepared for how much I would enjoy this memoir. Written in back-and-forth chapters with Kristine McKenna, the interesting style allows the reader to enjoy this book as both an autobiography and a memoir.

I loved the insights into such monumental films as Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Dune. With his films may be strange at times, the book is written in a straightforward manner that really lets you understand how he went about making them.

A great book for film fans.

This was well-done though it still was a bit of a stretch: the trick is how to not appear 'self-absorbed' while confirming trendsetting status. I don't think this book achieves that. Plus, Lynch does not even mention his kids in the last two pages of the book where he kinda is supposed to wrap it all up!

What is great about the book is that you find the ability this guy had of making his professional dreams come true by never giving up.

Room To Dream 

This is a very enjoyable biography told with a dual perspective that I found very readable and descriptive. I’m not quite sure how it got lost in my TBR pile, as I should have read it much sooner and wish I had now, as much as I’ve liked it. Filled with quirky stories about David Lynch as he grows up discovers what he’s about, moving from different places and the effects they had on him. When and how he got interested in art, and his near-obsession with art and painting that was such a part of his life for quite a while. Then the all-important point when David’s focus shifted from painting to making films. It also shares about his personal life too, his family and friends and many girlfriends until he marries and starts a family of his own. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, authors David Lynch & Kristine McKenna, and the publisher for my fair review.

The Authors:

David Lynch advanced to the front ranks of international cinema in 1977 with the release of his first film, the startlingly original Eraserhead. Since then, Lynch has been nominated for two Best Director Academy Awards for The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, was awarded the Palme d’Or for Wild at Heart, swept the country with Twin Peaks mania in 1990 when his groundbreaking television series premiered on ABC, and has established himself as an artist of tremendous range and wit. He is the author of a previous book, Catching the Big Fish, on Transcendental Meditation.


Kristine McKenna is a widely published critic and journalist who wrote for the Los Angeles Times from 1976 through 1998 and has been a close friend and interviewer of David Lynch since 1979. Her profiles and criticism have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, ARTnews, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. Her books include The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin and two collections of interviews.


Random House 534 pages
Pub: June 19th, 2018

My BookZone blog:
https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog200.wordpress.com/934

Lynch and McKenna combine to create a hybrid biography/memoir as she writes the basic facts and he fills in the details he remembers from different films and periods in his life. A great read for fans of art and film and of course, David Lynch.

David Lynch’s Sacred Clay
By Shehryar Fazli

CRITICS GENERALLY DEFINE “Lynchian” as the cohabitation of the macabre and the mundane. The severed ear hidden in the field in Blue Velvet may be the most iconic representation of this junction, but it’s everywhere in David Lynch’s work: from Twin Peaks’s sweet, brochure-like title sequence of a mountainous town that, as it turns out, hides Laura Palmer’s corpse and many other monstrosities, to the arrival of Naomi Watts’s aspiring actress Betty in a dreamlike Hollywood in Mulholland Drive, before the nightmare of that city consumes her. In Lynch’s early work, the small town is the theater of this dance of innocence and evil, but in his later films, namely the loose trilogy of Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), the macabre and the mundane coexist in the individual soul. Upon reading Room to Dream — Lynch’s newly released experimental memoir — one’s tempted to say that the same coupling exists in David Lynch himself.
With Lynch treading into his 70s, it’s an appropriate time for Room to Dream. This hybrid of biography and memoir by Lynch and journalist/critic Kristine McKenna offers hope of understanding an artist who, four decades into his career, remains a subject of much mystery and misinterpretation. Even his old school friends still don’t know the source of Lynch’s Lynchianism.
McKenna and Lynch alternate chapters, starting with McKenna, who covers a period of her subject’s life through extensive interviews with those who know and have worked with him, in turn prompting a chapter from the director about the same period. In sum, the book presents a quirky but ultimately lovable — and widely loved — man. With output as dark as his, one expects the outward oddity of an Alan Moore or a Tim Burton, or the intensity of a Terry Gilliam. When I describe him as one-part “mundane,” then, I don’t mean that Lynch is tedious in any sense, but that his persona is so endearing, so enamored of life and film, so — indeed — normal, that it’s confounding to think that behind this childlike chirpiness is the mind that gave us the ear and the depraved Frank Booth who severed it.
A straightforward summary of David’s upbringing, largely devoid of turbulence, would be a bore. The value of this book is in getting closer to the origins of Lynch’s art, which, as McKenna eloquently puts it, “resides in the complicated zone where the beautiful and the damned collide.” His early years seem to have provided the foundations. Born in 1946, he spent his childhood in Boise, Idaho, before moving to Alexandria, Virginia, as a teen, where he discovered his first love: painting. Nostalgia for Boise seems to have turned the middle-class small town into an ideal in Lynch’s heart that echoes in his work. McKenna writes:
The 1950s have never really gone away for Lynch. Moms in cotton shirtwaist dresses smiling as they pull freshly baked pies out of ovens; broad-chested dads in sport shirts cooking meat on a barbecue or heading off to work in suits; the ubiquitous cigarettes […] classic rock ‘n’ roll; diner waitresses wearing cute little caps; girls in bobby sox and saddle shoes, sweaters and pleated plaid skirts — these are all elements of Lynch’s aesthetic vocabulary.
There’s an elegy to this aesthetic in Mulholland Drive’s opening title sequence: splices of all those boys and girls swing dancing as if in a jitterbug contest. Hollywood is radiating ’50s congeniality as Betty emerges from the airport, escorted to her cab by a warm elderly couple expressing full confidence that they’ll soon see her on their TV screens. “Won’t that be the day!” Betty merrily replies. But the garish frozen smiles on that elderly couple as they leave Betty, like that of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, offer a warning that this affable setting, like the vivid rosebushes that open Blue Velvet, will be subverted in due course.
Lynch’s father, Donald, worked for the agriculture department. McKenna posits, “Perhaps his father’s work dealing with diseased trees imbued him with a heightened awareness of what he has described as ‘the wild pain and decay’ that lurk beneath the surface of things.” In Lynch’s hands, however, decay is not a function of time and history as it is, say, in the writings of V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald, but of the permanent presence of something threatening in humanity’s character. In part, his art is a parable of the rural-urban transition. Anxiety about big cities harassed him early, derived perhaps from childhood visits to New York. Lynch writes, “Everything about New York made me fearful. The subways were just unreal. Going down into this place, and the smell, and this wind would come with the trains, and the sound — I’d see different things in New York that made me fearful.” A move to Philadelphia in the mid-1960s, after unsuccessful attempts to keep a steady menial job in Alexandria, seems to have refined this anxiety into an artistic doctrine. According to McKenna, “The chaos of Philadelphia was in direct opposition to the abundance and optimism of the world he’d grown up in, and reconciling these two extremes was to become one of the enduring themes of his art.” The city was “dangerous and dirty,” providing “rich mulch for Lynch’s imagination.”
In Philadelphia, like the gushing water hydrant that gave Saul Bellow a new writing style, Lynch found his epiphany when, supposedly, some wind caused “a flicker of movement” in a painting he’d made of a figure standing among foliage. “Like a gift bestowed on him from the ether,” McKenna writes, “the idea of a moving painting clicked into focus in his mind.”
Some well-received shorts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts yielded an opportunity, upon moving to Los Angeles, to make his poem to urban horror, Eraserhead (1977). An underground success, the film caught the attention of influential studio players, including Mel Brooks, who gave Lynch the opportunity to make The Elephant Man (1980), which would go on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards. Dune came next in 1984, an artistic and professional debacle that ended up being a necessary turning pointing, from which Lynch emerged more resolute to fully own his material. “You die two deaths […] And that was Dune,” he writes. “You die once because you sold out, and you die twice because it was a failure.” (Whereas with the 1992 critical and commercial flop, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, he feels he only died once, since it was authentic Lynch.) Two years later, he got his revenge with a movie that was completely his.
Three things comingled to produce Blue Velvet in Lynch’s mind: Bobby Vinton’s song of the same name, which on a second hearing (after finding it “schmaltzy” the first time) summoned the image of green lawns, red lips, and, finally, a severed ear in a field. “I don’t know why it had to be an ear,” Lynch writes, “except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body […] The ear sits on the head and goes right into the mind, so it felt perfect.”
It is indeed captivating to read both McKenna and Lynch on the origin of his stories. Many like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and 1990’s Wild at Heart (based on a Barry Gifford novel), do have a basic plot, but their artistic merit is in their accumulation of effects and moments. As Julian Barnes wrote of a net in Flaubert’s Parrot: rather than “a meshed instrument designed to catch fish,” each can be seen as a “collection of holes tied together with string.” Room to Dream shows us how Lynch went about collecting his holes — from dreams he barely remembered, to a mysterious line spoken at the other end of a receiver, to people spotted on the side of the road who move him in some way and end up playing a role in one of his films. Collaborations were equally critical to his career. The most famous of these are Mark Frost, who co-created Twin Peaks and its reboot, and Angelo Badalamenti, who composed the series’s musical score, but others like Jack Fisk, a fellow painter and friend since the Alexandria days, and Dean Hurley, who mixed the sound of Inland Empire, also get their due.
As Lynch’s net gets wider, so, too, do the holes. By Lost Highway in 1997, the narrative barely coheres. Instead the pleasure is in a growing radicalism in Lynch’s storytelling: the Mystery Man who tells Bill Pullman’s Fred Madison not only that that they’ve met before, at Fred’s house, but that he, the Mystery Man, is at Fred’s house at that very moment, and goes on to prove it; Fred’s metamorphosis in prison into Pete, played by Balthazar Getty, a young man with a completely different life, though it does ultimately intersect with Fred’s again, at which point Pete turns back into Fred. Lost Highway offers a kind of quantum theory of personality, where you’re only probably who you are. Inland Empire, the most encrypted of all of Lynch’s movies, largely abolishes narrative altogether and instead ties disparate Lynch ideas — a sitcom of people in rabbit costumes, Polish prostitutes, psychosis — to a central story about a cursed film set.
¤
Lynch’s prose has all the innocence of the deceptive first part of a Lynch movie. The same guy who, McKenna tells us, finds pleasure in collecting human remains — embryos in bell jars, for example — and who once asked a woman who was about to have a hysterectomy if he could have her uterus, addresses the reader with things like, “I’ll tell you about a kiss I really remember.” About that encounter: “That was a kiss that got deeper and deeper, and it was lighting some fire.” About masturbation: “So I thought, I’m going to try this tonight. It took forever. Nothing was happening, right? And all of a sudden this feeling — I thought, Where is this feeling coming from? Whoa! The story was true and it was unbelievable. It was like discovering fire.” He doesn’t sound the least bit boastful when he says, “They thought I was so handsome. It was really great.” Or the least bit intimidating when he describes how “[a]nger came up in me like unreal.” His writing is sprayed with “sort ofs” and “kind ofs” and “so cools.” The hard work required to get Eraserhead into Cannes “almost killed me” — not because of the long hours themselves but because this meant giving up milkshake breaks. That, for Lynch, is one of the crises of fame.
There is, however, a problem with this kind of charm. It’s ultimately a performance, not in the sense that it’s inauthentic, but because it’s the voice of a raconteur; there’s something inevitably impersonal about it. Lynch doesn’t make you feel like you’re in a one-on-one with him, but instead like you’re one among several sitting on barstools around him. When McKenna writes of a divorce, she prepares us for Lynch’s perspective, but that never comes. His mother’s 2004 death in a car crash gets little attention from McKenna and none from Lynch — even as his ex-wife Mary Sweeney suggests “he was changed by his mother’s death.” Meanwhile, Lynch, a transcendental meditation devotee, devotes but a few pages to the death of the Indian guru Maharishi, whose funeral he flew to India to attend.
McKenna ends up not being too big a help here. While she understands her subject well, she’s also too close to him. Her fondness for her subject is not in itself a problem, especially given how universally loved Lynch seems to be. But when McKenna says, “Lynch is good at tuning out static,” or that “you’ve got to hand it to him” that he could make a film like Lost Highway, or that “[h]e doesn’t like it when things get too big and unwieldy, and he wants to be left in peace to make whatever it is he’s decided to make; it’s never been about fame or money for him,” she sounds less like a biographer than a friend. Even in discussing flops like Fire Walk with Me, McKenna seems keen not to hurt Lynch’s feelings. She seems much more comfortable calling a Lynch film a masterpiece.
Indeed, once we get to start of Lynch’s movie career, Room to Dream is less a biography than deep reporting of each of Lynch’s major projects, and some minor ones. Divorces are mentioned, for example, because they coincide with a film. Part of the problem is conceptual. Because Lynch would read the preceding McKenna chapter, it’s unsurprising that McKenna isn’t inclined toward too probing an account. But this sacrifices candor and revelation, and it’s hard to see the value of this peculiar framework. The fault may lie more with Lynch than McKenna, since he isn’t given to confession. His current wife, Emily Stofle, says, “We’re still very sweet to each other […] but he’s selfish, and as much as he meditates, I don’t know how self-reflective David is.” This comes not long after McKenna claims Lynch “has a unique gift for intimacy.” What draws readers to a biography or memoir like this is the question of how a great artist lives in and with the world. We don’t get the whole story here.
We do nevertheless get a sense of how Lynch’s imagination works, and how he brings that imagination to the screen. Blue Velvet’s editor seems to represent the majority view when he says, “It’s an honor to work with his material, because that’s sacred clay he produces.” If we don’t get enough of Lynch’s warts, at least we get to see him and the people around him playing with that clay

The inscrutable auteur David Lynch has delivered a number of memorable films that enthrall and confuse viewers. In Room to Dream we get to peek behind the camera to see what drives the visionary director and artist.

In this autobiographical work that's a collaboration between Lynch and Kristine McKenna, the chapters alternate between interviews with more than 100 colleagues, friends and family and Lynch's own recollections of events. The biography ranges from stories of his growing up in a small western town to the processes that went into creating such iconic works as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive.

Lynch was involved in even the smallest details of each of his works. He would often change directions on a whim if he felt it would serve the story and he was known to pull people from his production crew or even off of the street if he saw a roll for them in a film. Lynch's colleagues universally laud him as one of the kindest and most giving directors to have worked with. A number of artists interviewed for the book credit Lynch as having given them the chance that kick started their careers.

Other than Dune, Lynch has avoided projects that could be consider big-budget Hollywood movies. Room to Dream (Random House, digital galley) is a refreshing look at someone who has pursued a singular vision and is willing to say "no" when his goals don't align with financial backers.

To say David Lynch's movies are quirky and dark is an understatement. So I was surprised at how normal he seems in this book. He had a normal, church-going childhood but with parents who encouraged all their children to follow their dreams. David is the oldest child in the family and was very popular growing up and is remembered fondly.

This is a very long book but it's written so well the pages fly by. It's an interesting combination of biography by one author with each chapter followed by memoir by David. This makes for very easy reading and a fascinating insight into David the person. That's one thing I liked about this book - - it wasn't just a list of his films and accomplishments but a rounded account of the man. The interviews with people he knew makes for interesting aspects to events.

Fans of David Lynch should love this book but even people not familiar with his work will find it an enjoyable read.

Ever since the late 80's, I kind of binged on David Lynch and his movies. He was such an interesting director creating movies that weren't really for the masses. They were for him and for his art. This book is geared to those fans. To the people that want to know more about Lynch and his process and his personal history and how it relates to his films and art.
The story is told almost in two POVS. "This is a story of dualities." The first part of each chapter comes from Kristine McKenna. She has done her research and has included friends and family of David's in her chapters. While the research was obviously well done, the personal touch of getting people in David's life to be quoted and included was the real winner here. It pulled you in in a way that a normal non-fiction telling of a person's history wouldn't.
The second part of the chapters came from David. He elaborated on parts of Kristine's research and telling of his life and tended to go off on tangents and bring his own voice into his memoir of sorts. His POVs were just like his movies. Sometimes dark, sometimes confusing and sometimes completely off tangent from where I thought he'd go. But it worked. I got the whole picture as opposed to one side.
Overall, this book is for the true Lynch fan. It's not for someone just dabbling in finding out about him. It's for the fan that wants to know more and experience David and his life, his love and his art. It's quite a long book, so if you aren't ready to invest the time and energy into diving into David's history and head for a quite a while, then this may not be the book for you. But if you need and want to know more about Lynch and his process and the path that got him to his own version of success, then you've stumbled on a very different book that will feed your hunger for Lynch.

David Lynch....you magical, twisted man.

Room to Dream is the story of David Lynch. From his humble beginning to his show business success, this book provides insight to his fans. For the common people, i.e. me, it's a boring book with weird formatting and not very interesting stories.

Still, as a 'common person', I can see the beauty in creation and into the passion that David Lynch puts into his works.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This book will be a big hit with passionate David Lynch fans and serious film scholars, but for the rest of us, it's not a very compelling read.

The format is clever, with chapters alternating between traditional, third-person-style biography provided by Kristine McKenna and first-person memoir by Lynch. While this could be a great idea, it fails here, since McKenna's chapters are flat and lacking in insight, and Lynch's chapters are vivid and uninteresting. (A typical gem from Lynch is, "My fourth-grade teacher was named Mrs. Fordyce, and we called her Mrs. Four-Eyes." That's about as penetrating as it gets.)

Film buffs will enjoy reading about the details of Lynch's process and the backstories of how he made his movies.

In depth analysis of David Lynch and his creative processes. Each section is composed of two parts, one a biography, the other, a memoir illuminating the former. I've always been curious as to why someone who hit it out of the park with Eraserhead and Elephant Man was such a poor choice for Dune, but with subsequent work illustrating his influences more strategically, he redeemed himself. His small town upbringing is twisted on its ear (literally) with Blue Velvet, and his memory of going hunting with his father through nighttime Idaho, where all was black illuminated by headlights, shows up repeatedly most notably in the opening sequences of Dark Highway and Mulhulland Drive. He continues to find new ways of expressing himself, even in a cartoon titled "Angriest Dog in the World," and in producing his own coffee to go with superior pie. A true original.

Interesting format, great insight for a David Lynch lover. You could hear him as you read.I enjoyed the interviews with his exwives.

Great piece that I was thrilled to get the chance to read thanks to Netgalley, I recommend this title to anyone interested in learning more about David Lynch! Pieced together wonderfully!

Wow what a read this is. I was completely enthralled and entranced. Being a big fan of David Lynch's work I was very excited to read this new biography/memoir hybrid. The design of the book works really well and everything flows naturally.

The biography portions were lovingly written by Kristine McKenna and then are followed by memoir portions written by David Lynch himself.

This is a beautiful package of knowledge.

An interesting take on a biography. I liked that it was told from both a biographical and an autobiographical perspective. It seemed to give a more well rounded story. Lynch is such a unique and mythical figure in the film world that this glimpse into his life is interesting.

“Room to Dream” by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna is structured as a conversation about his life with the reader. This book is a storyteller at his best, recalling the stories of his life, the events that made him the complex person that he is. Readers want to know every detail. He pulls us into his life as he pulls us into his movies, and his stories, like his movies, are full of enlightenment cloaked in dark humor.
Lynch grew up in a small town, and with the usual middle-class experiences. He was an Eagle Scout, had supportive parents, and experienced a degree of freedom unimaginable today. Despite this, his childhood memories are a mixture of darkness and light.
The book contains Lynch’s personal recollections as well as comments and memories from childhood friends, family members and friends. The language and narrative construction is casual and friendly as if sitting with friends reminiscing about old times. His remarkable descriptive style makes every day run of the mill experiences compelling and interesting, but there is always that dark undertone to his life stories as there is in his movies.
I received a copy of “Room to Dream” from David Lynch, Kristine McKenna, Random House, and NetGalley. The book is a collection of little personal stories rather than a litany of accomplishments. It also includes the background of society and news of the time to frame his recollections to put them in social context. Lynch’s friendly narrative style paints vivid pictures of everyday occurrences that put the reader right there beside him. I absolutely recommend this book.