Room to Dream - David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

This is an interesting concept/experiment for a biography - McKenna has done diligent research on Lynch's life and interviews family and friends galore and then writes a chapter about a period of his life after which Lynch gets a chapter to respond/reflect upon McKenna's work! Integrating it might make a bit more sense and keep it a bit more cohesive, but I like the approach, regardless.

Lynch did a bit of traveling around as a child, but apparently had a fine childhood with a loving family and lots of friends and, even at a young age, girlfriends. His memory is pretty incredible as he brings up names, places and incidents in great detail from 50-ish years ago. Curiously enough, his youth was astonishingly normal and not what you would expect from a man who created such odd works. Although, I have to say, as I continue to read, there were certain incidents that he describes that are far from anything I ever experienced in my small home town! I don't want to give things away, but they almost sound dream-like and I wonder about their veracity. As he grows and becomes interested in being a painter, his horizons expand a bit and he tries to balance his home life, school life and artistic life. Amazingly (to me, anyway), while going to the Boston Museum School, he ends up being roommates with Peter Wolf from the J. Geils Band for a short while! It's a strange, small world.

After becoming fascinated by film and eventually moving to Los Angeles to school at American Film Institute, he got a grant to make Eraserhead and was able to use expansive grounds there to create the film with the help of friends, new and old, along with thrift stores and his own ingenuity. From there, things moved pretty fast, with Lynch gaining huge notoriety with Elephant Man and, after a flop (Dune), he returned with Blue Velvet and moved into TV with the hugely popular phenomenon, Twin Peaks (which was so monstrous that I ignored it at the time out of principle), along with several other projects.

From then on, he never stopped working, but created in many different media and became known for being a visual artist, printmaker and photographer as well as a filmmaker and also became a musician who collaborated with numerous other artists and released numerous records along with visual shows around the globe.

His story is one of a man with a personal vision who was able to fashion his own world and become relatively famous and reasonably well-off by doing precisely what he wants to do with as little compromise as possible. He's led a pretty fascinating life and will hopefully continue to create for years to come.