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

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, and illustrated with unseen photos from Waters’s personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’s most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book―another instant Waters classic.

John Waters

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

Farrar Straus & Giroux
Album artwork for Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John Waters
Hardback

$27.00

Hardcover

Released 05/21/2019Catalog Number

9780374214968

Learn more
John Waters

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

Farrar Straus & Giroux
Album artwork for Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John Waters
Hardback

$27.00

Hardcover

Released 05/21/2019Catalog Number

9780374214968

Learn more

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, and illustrated with unseen photos from Waters’s personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’s most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book―another instant Waters classic.