May 20, 2019

John Waters

Harvard Book Store welcomes renowned filmmaker, actor, visual artist, and author JOHN WATERS for an onstage conversation about his new memoir, Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. He will be joined in conversation by ALYSIA ABBOTT, award-winning author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father

Details

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 FlamingosPolyester, the original HairsprayCry-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.

About Author(s)

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’s 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.

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, which won the ALA Stonewall Award and the Prix Madame Figaro, and has been translated into French, Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the New York Times Book ReviewVoguePsychology TodayTriQuarterlyLit Hub, and elsewhere. She leads the Memoir Incubator at GrubStreet in Boston and lives with her family in Cambridge, MA.