Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder

· Macmillan Audio · Narrated by John Waters
Audiobook
10 hr 2 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

"[Just] like reading a description of a Waters film is nothing like seeing it on the screen, listening to him tell his own stories brings the context and inflection needed to truly appreciate his art. A singular experience." — Booklist

This program is read by the author and includes a bonus conversation.

No one knows more about everything—especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling—than John Waters.


The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, the original Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world’s great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: “Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all.”

Studded with cameos of Waters’s stars, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’s most hypnotic, upsetting, revelatory audiobook yet —another instant Waters classic.

Praise for John Waters:

"Cheerfully lewd and sincerely disingenuous, cult filmmaker, comic, and lifelong raconteur John Waters narrates his latest memoir/tell-all with a good-natured wink and a well-earned dab of sentimentality." — AudioFile Magazine

“Waters doesn’t kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird . . . [Waters] has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent.” — Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America’s desolate freeway nodes—though they’re brilliantly evoked—but of American fame itself.” — Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review

About the author

John Waters’s books Role Models (2010) and Carsick (2014) were major national bestsellers, and his spoken word shows This Filthy World and A John Waters Christmas continue to be performed around the world. Indecent Exposure, a retrospective exhibition of Waters’s acclaimed art work, was recently shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. He is at work on a novel.

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