Mr. KnowItAll, John Waters
Mr. KnowItAll, John Waters
4 Rating(s)
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

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

Author: John Waters

Narrator: John Waters

Unabridged: 10 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/21/2019

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

"[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 John Waters

John Waters is a writer, a film director, an actor, and a visual artist best known for his films, including Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, and Serial Mom. He is the author of the national bestsellers Role Models, Carsick and Mr. Know-It-All. His spoken-word shows This Filthy World, False Negative, and A John Waters Christmas continue to be performed around the world. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Hank

Mostly enjoyable, especially when he brings us into the private, day-to-day details of his daily existence -- his thoughts on air travel, summers in Provincetown, the inevitability of age and death. I was less fascinated by recollections from his movie-making heyday, though I do believe he has an ex......more

Goodreads review by Robin

I listened to John Waters read the audiobook and his filth elder advice is hilarious. I recommend it to fans of his work. He chose to write interesting personal stories that include his famous crew, Devine, Edith Massey, Mink Stole, and all the rest. The chapter where he takes LSD with Mink Stole at......more

Goodreads review by Kasa

There is only one John Waters, and he chooses to present his memoir in the form of a "how-to-be-me" advice column. Life, death and "Chutes and Ladders board game known as show business." He covers it all. It's fair to say he doesn't suffer fools lightly, but is also the best kind of friend to those......more

Goodreads review by Seema

Irreverant ~ Well-written ~ Charming ~ Relevant tl;dr: Memoir of John Waters is actually basically a book about life John Waters is an old fav of mine. So, that his book would be extraordinary didn't surprise me. However, what surprised me was how relevant this book felt. That a man who started out ma......more

Goodreads review by Lori

I really wanted to be able to give this book a better rating. I like John Waters. I have seen some of his work over the years, and enjoy his contributions on talk shows such as Real Time with Bill Maher. I purchased the audio book, as I like hearing people’s stories told in their own voices, and I w......more


Quotes

"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

"[O]ne of those books that you definitely should listen to on audiobook."
-BookPage

"[A] wry, sardonic, tell-all audiobook flavored with Waters' uniquely blunt, insightful, and tongue-in-cheek sense of wit. Mr. Know-It-All is acerbic, biting, and utterly hilarious."
-Midwest Book Review