In this memoir, David Lynch...opens up about a lifetime of extraordinary creativity, the friendships he has made along the way and the struggles he has faced to bring his projects to fruition.
'I like to remember things my own way . . . not necessarily the way they happened. That would be the perfect epigraph for this book...the result...cubist portrait of the artist, body and mind on separate tracks. This technique ensures that Room to Dream offers countless new stories, even for Lynch fanatics. Room to Dream pulls off a neat trick in drawing back a curtain and revealing relatively little...showing us to a room that provides refuge from the angry world outside, where he finds the safety that’s necessary to create. With the right attitude and approach...Lynch...suggests other artists may also find a room to dream.
What makes this book endearing is its chatty, calm...anti-Hollywood attitude…and matter-of-fact defiance of reality that won’t alarm your dog or save mankind. This is a living book by two authors who deserve to be read as partners. Part of the charm of Room to Dream is how the two parts of the book nod to one another ... I can believe that the casual and yarning text by Lynch himself was read into a tape recorder but I don’t think his expansive eloquence would have existed without his faith in Kristine McKenna.
You could read these passages and decide that David was a pain in the neck, a weird mix of pretension, calculation and insufferable.
What makes Room to Dream different from your average celebrity tell-all — aside from the idiosyncratic figure at its center — is the book’s form. It is composed as a diptych: one half biography, one half memoir ... The book doesn’t give us one focused view of Lynch, but a double vision, as though two similar but not quite exact portraits of the man have been projected onto one another ... the blending of biography and memoir into a kind of biographical duet turns the whole project on its head, makes it different, stranger, more alive ... Sometimes these tales move the plot of his life forward, and sometimes they feel random, tangential, maybe even unnecessary ... there is value, joy, and beauty in staying with Lynch and his cohorts for these 500-plus pages, no matter where they take you or how long they seem to stare into space making a decision.
