Room to Dream

by David Lynch, Kristine McKenna Narrated by David Lynch, Kristine McKenna

Overview

An unprecedented look into the personal and creative life of the visionary auteur David Lynch, through his own words and those of his closest colleagues, friends, and family—adapted by David Lynch from the print book especially for this audio program

In this unique hybrid of biography and memoir, David Lynch opens up for the first time about a life lived in pursuit of his singular vision, and the many heartaches and struggles he's faced to bring his unorthodox projects to fruition. Lynch's lyrical, intimate, and unfiltered personal reflections riff off biographical sections written by close collaborator Kristine McKenna and based on more than one hundred new interviews with surprisingly candid ex-wives, family members, actors, agents, musicians, and colleagues in various fields who all have their own takes on what happened.

Room to Dream is a landmark book that offers a onetime all-access pass into the life and mind of one of our most enigmatic and utterly original living artists.

With insights into . . .
Eraserhead
The Elephant Man
Dune
Blue Velvet
Wild at Heart
Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Lost Highway
The Straight Story
Mulholland Drive
INLAND EMPIRE
Twin Peaks: The Return

Adapted For Audio

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

It’s no surprise that avante-garde filmmaker David Lynch’s memoir/biography is far from ordinary. Lynch and his close friend, journalist Kristine McKenna, have compiled a multifaceted look at this singular talent. Lynch delivers his point of view in a slightly scratchy tenor. He sounds honest, amused, and friendly as he recounts moments from his childhood and later life that profoundly influenced his filmmaking. From his observations, we hear the young visionary emerging. McKenna’s chapters offer a more traditional biography filled with facts. Her intelligent reading extracts rich details from candid interviews with Lynch’s friends, family, ex-wives, ex-lovers, along with the agents, actors, and others who worked with him. Delving into his experiences with such films as ERASERHEAD, DUNE, BLUE VELVET, and more, Lynch’s audiobook will surprise and sometimes confound but always fascinate. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

The New York Times Book Review - Ben Dickinson

McKenna turns in an impressively industrious and comprehensive account of Lynch's career…Room to Dream is an absorbing glimpse into a compulsively creative soul whose credo might as well be, as he writes at one point: "I love the logic of dreams. Anything can happen and it makes sense."

Publishers Weekly - Audio

★ 07/30/2018
Filmmaker Lynch and coauthor McKenna both contribute their voices to this wonderfully entertaining audiobook about Lynch’s life and his creative influences. The chapters alternate between first-person accounts from Lynch and more traditional biographical accounts written and read by McKenna. McKenna’s reading style is clear and unembellished. She reads her portion of the book, which paints Lynch as a visionary artist whose creative genius is guided by a mix of intuition and impulsiveness, in a detached journalistic manner. Lynch hems and haws, often riffing on topics discussed in McKenna’s chapters. His sections of the book are unpredictable yet strangely alluring as he moves breathlessly from one topic to the next. An anecdote about a meeting with comedian George Burns, for example, suddenly transforms into a discussion of the revival of Lynch’s hit show Twin Peaks. In another section, he muses on the talents of actor Richard Farnsworth and then veers off into the adverse effects of genetically modified corn. While Lynch’s sections no doubt steal the show, his entertaining style works in part because McKenna’s sections give the book direction. A Random House hardcover. (June)

Publishers Weekly

04/09/2018
The avant-garde director of The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet and cocreator of Twin Peaks remembers a life as surreal as his movies in this exuberant biography/memoir. In chapters that alternate between Lynch’s first-person narrative and biographical accounts written by McKenna (Talk to Her), the book presents an illuminating look into Lynch’s life, drawing heavily on McKenna’s interviews with actors, ex-wives, and friends that paint an admiring portrait of a charismatic man given to intuitive improvisations, like sticking the script supervisor into a blue-wigged speaking role in Mulholland Drive. Interspersed chapters contain Lynch’s own memories that explore his creative process from its roots in strange visual imagery to his long-shot quests for financing (“ ‘It’s about a man who’s three and a half feet tall, with a red pompadour, who runs on sixty-cycle alternating-current electricity’” went one unsuccessful pitch). Lynch is a great raconteur, and at the book’s heart are his anecdotes, featuring colorful grotesques like the hunch-backed con-man who borrowed his phone to make fraudulent fund-raising calls, and dark intrusions of sexuality into wholesome landscapes (as a boy in idyllic Boise, Idaho, he recalls, he once saw a naked, bleeding woman silently wandering the night-time streets). The result is an entertainingly offbeat show-biz saga and a fine evocation of Lynch’s unique voice and sensibility. Photos. (June)

From the Publisher

Insightful . . . an impressively industrious and comprehensive account of Lynch’s career.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A memorable portrait of one of cinema’s great auteurs . . . provides a remarkable insight into [David] Lynch’s intense commitment to the ‘art life.’ ”—The Guardian

“This is the best book by and about a movie director since Elia Kazan’s A Life (1988) and Michael Powell’s A Life in Movies (1986). But Room to Dream is more enchanting or appealing than those classics. . . . What makes this book endearing is its chatty, calm account of how genius in America can be a matter-of-fact defiance of reality that won’t alarm your dog or save mankind. It’s the only way to dream in so disturbed a country.”—San Francisco Chronicle

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

It’s no surprise that avante-garde filmmaker David Lynch’s memoir/biography is far from ordinary. Lynch and his close friend, journalist Kristine McKenna, have compiled a multifaceted look at this singular talent. Lynch delivers his point of view in a slightly scratchy tenor. He sounds honest, amused, and friendly as he recounts moments from his childhood and later life that profoundly influenced his filmmaking. From his observations, we hear the young visionary emerging. McKenna’s chapters offer a more traditional biography filled with facts. Her intelligent reading extracts rich details from candid interviews with Lynch’s friends, family, ex-wives, ex-lovers, along with the agents, actors, and others who worked with him. Delving into his experiences with such films as ERASERHEAD, DUNE, BLUE VELVET, and more, Lynch’s audiobook will surprise and sometimes confound but always fascinate. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2018-04-04
It takes a tag-team effort to tell this ambitious life of the enigmatic filmmaker and artist.Lynch (Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, 2006) has always been an outsider when it comes to his films, art, and photography, so it comes as no surprise that this dual biography/autobiography is "strange," as the authors describe it. Journalist and friend McKenna (The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin, 2009, etc.) pens an insightful, well-researched, conventional biography in chapters drawing mostly on interviews. Lynch's chapters follow hers, responding like "a person having a conversation with his own biography." Inevitably, there is repetition, and it's not uncommon for McKenna to tell a story one way and Lynch to tell it differently. Lynch comes across as an amiable, chatty fellow who wears his brilliance lightly. He writes lovingly of his "dreamy," itinerant, middle-class childhood where the roots for his films were first planted. He enthusiastically describes how he felt after receiving an American Film Institute grant that would allow him to make his first feature film, Eraserhead. McKenna writes that "John Waters encouraged his fans" to see it, and Stanley Kubrick "loved" it. It also got Mel Brooks' attention, and he asked Lynch to direct The Elephant Man for his production company. Lynch describes making the film as a "baptism of fire." It was "a beautiful story and a beautiful experience and it's timeless." Next came Dune, which "brought him to his knees," McKenna writes—but it also "helped clarify precisely who he is as a filmmaker." It was a "good thing," Lynch responds, "to have a humiliating major failure." In the end, Lynch sums it all up: "It's impossible to really tell the story of somebody's life, and the most we can hope to convey here is a very abstract ‘Rosebud.' "Although an awkward read, the book abounds in great stories and terrific movie trivia that will sate Lynch fans for years to come.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169412550
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/19/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Room to Dream"
by .
Copyright © 2018 David Lynch.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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