Driven by an honest perspective on his life and work, the just-released memoir-biography hybrid Room to Dream is the most intimate window we’ve yet had into David Lynch’s mind. Should you, like me, be left wanting more, the audiobook companion, read by him and co-author Kristine McKenna and clocking in at a whopping 15 hours and 45 minutes, might be a good place to turn. But just as their book has fun with the biographical format, neither is this a straight-and-narrow treatment of its format: while Lynch’s written sections resulted from “numerous rewrites” of interviews with his co-author, the spoken-word rendition is, according to Penguin, a retelling “inspired by McKenna’s transcriptions that appear in the book.”
Long story short: I’m very glad to debut audio from one of Room to Dream‘s finest passages — Lynch’s short, somewhat troubled, ultimately (kind of) charming relationship with Marlon Brando, with whom he and Harry Dean Stanton met about a never-produced “surrealistic comedy” Dream of the Bovine, and from whom they heard about cookies made from grass that grows in salt water. And a grass-fueled car. Something like that. I’m not going to tell the story better than Lynch, whose rendition makes “banana and tomato” enough to send me in a giggling fit, so I’ll leave you to it.
Listen below:
Room to Dream is now available.