NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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 “Insightful . . . an impressively industrious and comprehensive account of Lynch’s career.”— The New York Times Book Review In this unique hybrid of biography and memoir, David Lynch opens up about a life lived in pursuit of his singular vision, and the many heartaches and struggles he 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 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 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 “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 David Lynch advanced to the front ranks of international cinema in 1977 with the release of his first film, the startlingly original Eraserhead . Over the course of his career, Lynch was nominated for three Best Director Academy Awards ( The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive ), won 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 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. David Lynch died in January 2025. Kristine McKenna is a widely published critic and journalist who wrote for the Los Angeles Time s 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. Chapter 1 David Lynch’s mother was a city person and his father was from the country. That’s a good place to begin this story, because this is a story of dualities. “It’s all in such a tender state, all this flesh, and it’s an imperfect world,” Lynch has observed, and that understanding is central to everything he’s made. We live in a realm of opposites, a place where good and evil, spirit and matter, faith and reason, innocent love and carnal lust, exist side by side in an uneasy truce; Lynch’s work resides in the complicated zone where the beautiful and the damned collide. Lynch’s mother, Edwina Sundholm, was the descendant of Finnish immigrants and grew up in Brooklyn. She was bred on the smoke and soot of cities, the smell of oil and gasoline, artifice and the eradication of nature; these things are an integral part of Lynch and his worldview. His paternal great-grandfather homesteaded land in the wheat country near Colfax, Washington, where his son, Austin Lynch, was born in 1884. Lumber mills and soaring trees, the scent of freshly mowed lawns, starry nighttime skies that only exist far from the cities—these things are part of Lynch, too. David Lynch’s grandfather became a homesteading wheat farmer like his father, and after meeting at a funeral, Austin and Maude Sullivan, a girl from St. Maries, Idaho, were married. “Maude was educated and raised our father to be really motivated,” said Lynch’s sister, Martha Levacy, of her grandmother, who was the teacher in the one-room schoolhouse on the land she and her husband owned near Highwood, Montana. Austin and Maude Lynch had three children: David Lynch’s father, Donald, was the second, and he was born on December 4th, 1915, in a house without running water or electricity. “He lived in a desolate place and he loved trees because there were no trees on the prairie,” said David’s brother, John. “He