“Mark Frost has all the answers,” says Kyle Mac­Lachlan, star of Twin Peaks: The Return. “He’s the guy you want to listen to.”

In Showtime’s 18-episode revival of the 1990s cult classic Twin Peaks, clarity was notoriously hard to come by. “What year is this?” Mac­Lachlan’s Agent Dale Cooper asks in the finale, underscoring the difficulty in this world of nailing down even the most basic information. Instead of answering him, Sheryl Lee, returning as murder victim Laura Palmer, lets loose a piercing shriek as the screen cuts to black. Her screams might as well have been those of countless Twin Peaks fans left with more questions than ever before.

But Mark Frost, who created the original series as well as the revival alongside David Lynch, had answers, and he shared them with those who knew where to look. His companion book to the series, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, became a best-seller last year and a source for fans to find intel on everything from what’s going on with fan favorite Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) to the haunting question that ended the original series’s run: “How’s Annie?” Though Lynch, the compellingly eccentric other half of the Twin Peaks founding duo, tends to get all the press attention (along with four of Twin Peaks: The Return’s nine Emmy nominations; he and Frost share one for writing), Frost is the one who’s shown at least some willingness to reveal the secrets of the kingdom.

Frost’s hair, like Lynch’s, has gone snow white since Twin Peaks changed both men’s lives in 1990. Frost wears his swept back in a more subdued version of Lynch’s famous quiff, and he speaks warmly and directly, with none of his partner’s signature discursive style. He called a little late on a Saturday afternoon—his son’s baseball practice had run long—from his home in Ojai, California, where he and his wife moved to escape Hollywood more than a decade ago.

“I didn’t pay any attention to it,” Frost says of the mythology that has grown up around Twin Peaks since it first aired. “I was doing other things, you know?”

When the original series ended its run, in 1991, Frost returned to his first love: literature. The man who wrote three novels before the age of 15 has since published three nonfiction books on golf, including The Greatest Game Ever Played—adapted into a 2005 film starring a young Shia LaBeouf—and several more novels, including a young-adult trilogy with the Peaks-ian title Paladin Prophecy. But none took off in the same way as his epistolary novels, 2016’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks and 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, which see Agent Tammy Preston (played by Chrysta Bell in The Return) digging into the occult history and tragic present of the mysterious logging town.

When Frost and Lynch first met, in the mid-80s, Frost was already a fan of the director’s early work: the experimental *Eraserhead *and Oscar-nominated The Elephant Man. Having cut his teeth writing for network TV shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man and Hill Street Blues, Frost, in his early 30s, was introduced to Lynch over—what else?—a cup of coffee. The pair hit it off and, after a few joint projects failed to launch, landed a deal with ABC to co-write Twin Peaks, about the mysterious murder of a teenage girl named Laura Palmer and its impact on a small Pacific Northwest town. “It is doubtful whether ABC would have gone for one partner without the other,” Richard Woodward wrote in a 1990 New York Times profile.