Room to Dream takes a unique approach to biography: each chapter written by a biographer (in this case, Kristine McKenna) is followed by a chapter written by the subject (in this case, director David Lynch). I confess that, about halfway through the book, I found myself skipping the McKenna chapters.
Every book I read teaches me something; this one reminded me that memory is a tricky beast. Friends and acquaintances of Lynch remember an event happening one way; Lynch will remember it di!erently. Lynch encounters a photograph documenting a high school kiss that he doesn’t remember … but another kiss, never photographed, proves more present, more durable, more meaningful.
Looking back at my own life, I wonder: how many of the scenes I turn over in my mind again and again — a fleeting kiss, an intimate late-night conversation with a friend, the loss of virginity, a date gone sour, a friend’s car accident, roads not taken — are more manufactured than remembered?
This was also the first book that pointed me to “the sequencing paradigm” — a screenwriting technique that builds a screenplay from scenes sketched out on seventy cards. I’d like to know more about it. (Conveniently, Amazon.com offered me the book today.)
Highlights and Quotes
#integrity
- “Give yourself permission to express yourself as freely and completely as possible, have faith that this is a worthy endeavor, and believe that you can do it.”
- “You can live with yourself perfectly fine if you stay true to what you love.”
#anger
“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.”
#failure
“Failure is a beautiful thing, because when the dust settles there’s nowhere to go but up, and it’s a free You can’t lose more, but you can gain.”
#aging
“People don’t really have an age, because the self that we talk to doesn’t age — that self is ageless. The body gets old, but that’s all that changes.”