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

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

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

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

by John Waters

Paperback

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Overview

The newest essay collection from the New York Times bestselling author John Waters, reflecting on how to overcome newfound respectability and rebel in the autumn of your years.

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, 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, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from the author's personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’ most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book—another instant Waters classic.

Praise for John Waters

“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


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781250619464
Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 07/21/2020
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 435,574
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

About The Author
John Waters’ books Role Models (2010) and Carsick (2014) were 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’ acclaimed artwork, 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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Mr. Know-It-All 1

Bye-Bye, Underground 13

Accidentally Commercial 29

Going Hollywood 47

Clawing My Way Higher 67

Tepid Applause 79

Sliding Back Down 91

Back in the Gutter 101

I Got Rhythm 123

Act Bad 153

Gristle 173

Delayed 189

Overexposed 207

Flashback 227

One-Track Mind 253

My Brutalist Dream House 267

No Vacation 277

Betsy 301

Run - On Andy 317

My Son, Bill 331

Grim Reaper 345

Sources 365

Acknowledgments 371

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