David Lynch to hit back at media 'bullshit' with his own memoir

The director David Lynch has teamed up with the journalist Kristine McKenna to hit back at the “bullshit” surrounding his life and work in a book due to be published in 2017.

“There’s a lot of bullshit out there about me, in books and all over the Internet,” Lynch said in a statement from Canongate, which has acquired rights to publish Life and Work in the UK. “I want to get all the right information in one place, so if someone wants to know something, they can find it here. And I wouldn’t do it with anyone other than Kristine; she and I go way back, and she gets it right.”

Lynch’s co-author recalled tracking the director down for an interview “after having my mind blown by Eraserhead in the late ‘70s” and paid tribute to the “inexhaustible imagination” which has made his work “increasingly complex and beautiful”.

But – as fans of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive might expect – the new book will be nothing so straightforward as an autobiography. Based on a series of interviews with 90 of the director’s friends, family and collaborators, McKenna will weave together the story of his career and Lynch’s own reflections on these encounters, with the filmmaker “riffing on his own life”.

This dual structure will explore what the publisher called a “lifetime of extraordinary creativity”. Born in 1946, Lynch first studied fine art before starting to make films in the early 1970s. The disturbing visions of Eraserhead brought him cult success, with commercial and critical success following with The Elephant Man, which was nominated for eight Academy Awards. His adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune was, by contrast, a flop, but the director returned to the top of his game with Blue Velvet – a disorientating blend of psychological horror and film noir – and the TV series Twin Peaks, which is set in motion by the discovery of a naked body wrapped in clear plastic on the shores of a river.

Lynch is currently shooting a third series of the show, which is also due for release in 2017, making this the “perfect moment to revisit some of the extraordinary highlights of his career”, according to Canongate publishing director Francis Bickmore. “Canongate are over the moon about publishing him,” he said.

The book will not be the director’s first. In 2007, he published Catching the Big Fish, a study of “meditation, consciousness and creativity”, which has been translated into 26 languages.