DAVID BENNUN

BIOGRAPHY

Room To Dream David Lynch and Kristine McKenna Canongate, €23 ★★★★★

As a film-maker David Lynch – the auteur behind Twin Peaks (below) and Blue Velvet – is known for a particular mix of menace, mystery, obscurity, sensuality, nonsequiturs and black humour. So at odds with his work is his public persona – an innocent gee-whizz Fifties throwback – that people often take it to be a put-on. Not according to Room To Dream.

For Lynch’s biography, Kristine McKenna has spoken to almost everyone of note in his personal and working life. To each chapter, Lynch (right) has appended a response, giving his own account, less of the events than of what he thought and felt about them at the time. It’s the antithesis of a showbiz memoir studded with starry anecdotes – but Lynch’s life as an artist is genuinely fascinating, and his observations on it are illuminating. It’s difficult at times to tell if one is reading hagiography or if Lynch simply is as adorable as the book suggests: charming, charismatic, irresistible to women, yet also honest, warm, funny and possessed of iron artistic integrity. Decades of goodwill being hard to fake, I veer towards the latter. Either nobody has a bad word for him, or McKenna disdains to repeat any – with one exception, when his present wife, Emily Stofle, remarks he is ‘selfish, and as much as he meditates, I don’t know how self-reflective David is’. The emphasis on transcendental meditation (Lynch’s most important influence) recalls one of those documentaries wherein the subject plugs something that otherwise wouldn’t get airtime. But the story concludes on a high with the recent revival of Twin Peaks, a triumph that shows you can go home again – if you’re David Lynch.