Book Review: Room to Dream by David Lynch & Kristine McKenna

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. Please read my full disclosure for more information.

“Room to Dream” acts as a part-memoir and part-biography of David Lynch’s life from the personal (his creative process and personal life lessons) to the artistic (his art and his films).

Buy “Room to Dream”

Although written chronologically, “Room to Dream” is constantly separated into two parts — in every chapter, the first part is expertly written by Kristine McKenna who digs through anecdotes, reflections, and interviews to present Lynch’s life and works, and then the second part is retold in Lynch’s own words.

I started reading “Room to Dream” on the day of David Lynch’s passing, January 16th, 2025. It would be too reductive to say the cinema world was in mourning. In truth, the art world at large was and still is mourning. David Lynch was a true visionary and a veritable multidisciplinary artist.

It is safe to assume that I loved this memoir. Expansive in its scope, it covers nearly everything – Lynch’s upbringing, relationships, films and shows, exhibits, thoughts and processes on the ‘art life’, hopes, dreams, and love for transcendental meditation, to name a few.

In this review, I won’t be covering everything. I will possibly make a separate post and YouTube video dissecting more of what I loved and learned in the future. However, I will be sharing some of my favourite discoveries, passages, and reflections on what I’ve read. I will not be focusing on Lynch’s filmography but more so on his creativity and approach to life instead.

One thing to remember: the memoir is split between Kristine McKenna’s interviews and her writing of Lynch’s biography and then every chapter splits and ends with Lynch’s own words of the events being reported. The audiobook is even better because Lynch goes off script and effortlessly chats rather than narrates his life story!

Let’s dive in and start with Lynch’s childhood. I’ve always been fascinated with artists’s childhood. I’ve also noticed that those who start young in their artistic careers oftentimes have supportive and encouraging parents like Lynch’s.’

This was a reflection I had while reading Tom Felton’s memoir “Beyond the Wand” last year. (You can read that review here.)

By all accounts, Lynch’s parents were exceptional people. “Our parents let us do things that were kind of crazy and you wouldn’t do today,” said John Lynch. “They were very open and never tried to force us to go one way or another.” David Lynch’s first wife, Peggy Reavey, said, “Something David told me about his parents that was extraordinary was that if any of their kids had an idea for something they wanted to make or learn about, it was taken absolutely seriously. They had a workshop where they did all kinds of things, and the question immediately became: How do we make this work? It moved from being something in your head to something out in the world real fast, and that was a powerful thing.”

“David’s parents supported their kids in being, who they were,” Reavey continued, “but David’s father had definite standards of behavior. You didn’t treat people crappy, and when you did something you did it wei he was strict about that. David has impeccable standards when it comes to craft, and I’m sure his father had something to do with that?” (p. 7)

Having parents who support and encourage creativity is a beautiful thing and should be the standard, in my opinion. I could even read and picture the excitement from the page, it laid the groundwork for Lynch’s life:

Project! The word “project” was so thrilling to everyone in my family You get an idea for a project, and you get your tools together, and tools are some of the greatest things in the world! That people invent things to make things more precise—it’s incredible. Like Peggy said, my parents look it seriously when I got ideas for things I wanted to make.

My parents were so loving and good. They’d had good parents, too, and everybody loved my parents. They were just fair. It’s something you don’t really think about, but when you hear other people’s stories you realize how lucky you were. And my dad was a character. I always said if you cut his leash he’d go right into the woods. (p. 19)

Similarly, it’s a breath of fresh air to read and learn about an artist who doesn’t limit himself and stays true to his artistic vision. I grew up differently from Lynch; discouraged and shamed for my artistic pursuits, which explains my penchant for artists who were free to be creative as a youngling!

“David is eager to make money but he won’t compromise and never has, and that’s not what was happening at the beginning of Dune,” said Nicita.

“David keeps it very pure. There are temptations in this business, and his success bred forces that tried to corrupt him—there were many opportunities for him to do big pictures that would’ve paid him a fortune and he turned them all down. He was offered a lot early on when people thought he’d do what they wanted him to do, but when it became clear he was a true auteur, that aspect of things dried up. All the major stars wanted to work with him, too, but he isn’t star oriented. David is an artist and he doesn’t want some big gorilla in the middle of his vision.” (p. 176)

“David would say meditation is the source of his happiness,” said Laura Dern, “and I’m sure that’s true. He knows who he was and who he became almost immediately after he started meditating, so he’s the best judge of that.

I would add, though, that I think part of his happiness has to do with the fact that he places no limits on himself as a creative person. There’s a lot of self-judgment and shame in our culture, and David doesn’t have any of that. When he makes something he never wonders what people will think of it, or what he should be making, or what the zeitgeist needs. He makes what bubbles up out of his brain, and that is part of his joy.” (p. 213)

This next passage particularly made me think about how I approach my creative ideas. Deep down, I know I owe it to myself to see them through the way I want to execute them in writing. It is that pesky shame that I need to shed. As Lynch said, I need to ‘stay true to what [I] love’:

I don’t know how I got to that thing of not caring what other people think, but it’s a good thing. The thing is, you fall in love with ideas and it’s like falling in love with a girl. It could be a girl you wouldn’t want to take home to your parents, but you don’t care what anybody else thinks.

You’re in love and it’s beautiful and you stay true to those things. There’s this Vedic line that goes, “Man has control of action alone, never the fruit of that action.” In other words, you do the best you can and how the thing goes into the world, you can’t control that. It’s lucky when it goes good and it’s gone good for me, and it’s horrible when it goes bad and it’s gone bad for me. Everybody’s had those experiences, but so what? You die two deaths if you’ve sold out and not done what you were supposed to do. And that was Dune. You die once because you sold out, and you die twice because it was a failure. Fire Walk with Me didn’t do anything out in the world, but I only died one time with that picture, because I felt good about it. You can live with yourself perfectly fine if you stay true to what you love. (p. 237)

Another fascinating facet of David Lynch’s ‘lore’ is his love and respect for meditation and the Maharishi. So much so, that he created the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. He even dipped in the polluted water of the Ganges, India surrounded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashes (pp. 466-467.)

His thoughts on meditating and releasing anger reminded me of how often creatives are taught to suffer in order to create “good art”:

Before I started meditating I worried that doing it would make me lose my edge, and I didn’t want to lose the fire to make stuff. I found out it gives you more fire to make stuff and more happiness in the doing and way more of an edge. People think anger is an edge, but anger is a weakness that poisons you and the environment around you. It’s not a healthy thing and it’s not good for relationships, for sure. (p. 131)

I think the daily meditation and his presence of mind and place are, in part, what made him a wonderful person to be around, not only as a director and artist. When I watch interviews and videos on David Lynch, I can feel that presence too:

A central part of Lynch’s gift is the fluidity of his imagination: He builds on what’s around him as opposed to looking for what isn’t there, and it’s something everyone who works with him comments on. “One of the most important things David’s taught me is to be really present,” said Sheryl Lee. “He pays attention to everything and can adapt to whatever is happening around him and transform it into art because he’s not attached to what’s supposed to be.

That’s part of what makes it so thrilling to be on set with him and why it’s so alive.” (p. 253)

Hence, it is for these reasons that many dislike and can’t connect with artists like David Lynch. Whereas those who love him, love him ferociously for what he stands: an unapologetic artist. The only other ones that come to my mind are Marina Abramović, Patti Smith, Anthony Bourdain, and Bob Dylan (I recently watched his biopic starring Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unkown.)

I highly recommend “Room to Dream” to every David Lynch fan, movie-lover (although I did not discuss his movies in this review), and artist alike.

Before we end, there is a particular passage that moved me to tears that I wanted to share. It is the one in which Lynch visits the famous Italian director Fellini, one of his idols, before his passing in 1993:

We go into this room where there are two single beds, and Fellini’s in a wheelchair between the two beds, facing out. He’d been talking to a journalist named Vincenzo who was in there, and Tonino knows Vincenzo, so the two of them start talking. They got me a chair and I sit down in front of Fellini’s wheelchair with a little table attached and he holds my hand. It was the most beautiful thing. We sit for half an hour holding hands, and he tells me these stories about the old days and how things have changed and how it’s depressing him the way things are. He said, “David, in the old days I’d come down and take my coffee, and all these film students would come over and we’d talk and they knew everything about film. They weren’t watching TV, they were going to cinema, and we’d have these great talks over coffee. Now I come down and there’s nobody there. They’re all watching TV and they’re not talking about film the way they once did.” After our time was over I stood up and told him the world was waiting for his next film and then I left. I ran into Vincenzo much later and he told me that after I left that night, Fellini said, “That’s a good boy.” He went into a coma two days later, then he died.

I think things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. (p. 329)

Condensed with my grief of his passing, this part truly pulled at my heartstrings because it is in the same vein of mourning, one for an artistic visionary, that Lynch’s fans have been going through since January 2025.

What’s more striking is that we are losing the respect for the arts and the greats and therefore, the new emerging artists who will push against the grain once more. I fear a world in which apathy towards the arts and humanities will be widespread. We already exist in a world where the new Patti Smiths or David Lynchs cannot exist despite everyone claiming that anyone can reach ‘internet fame’ and ‘celebrity status.’ I urge you to understand that this is not the same. They are artists, not celebrities. They are not cogs in a capitalist system, they are symbols of change and exploration. They are for the people. They are for humanity.

It is our task to combat the erasure of art and artistic living for capitalistic gains and mass-produced, lifeless AI-generated art.

I tune out everything; you keep your eye on the donut not the hole. (p. 233)

Money’s a funny thing. The whole point of having money is to feel Free, and relatively speaking, I guess I have some money now, but I’ve never felt free. It’s the weirdest thing. I’ve never really felt free. One time right after Peggy and I decided to split up, I had a euphoria of freedom.

I remember I was riding in a convertible on one of those freeway cloverleafs in downtown L.A., and I was on a section where it seemed to soar up into the air and I felt real freedom for a moment or two. And that’s pretty much the extent of my ever feeling free. I don’t know what it is that [feel is constraining me, but I do know that I have obligations, so I’m not really free. (p. 268)

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐