Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780374214968)

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.

"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

Author: John Waters
ISBN-10: 0374214964
ISBN-13: 9780374214968
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language: English
Published: 05/21/2019
Pages: 384
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.70w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/2019 pg. 53
Publishers Weekly 03/25/2019
Kirkus Reviews 04/01/2019 pg. 97
Booklist 04/01/2019 pg. 10
Library Journal 05/01/2019 pg. 97
Shelf Awareness 06/28/2019
BookPage 05/01/2019