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  • Mr. Know-It-All

  • The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder
  • Written by: John Waters
  • Narrated by: John Waters
  • Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (24 ratings)

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Mr. Know-It-All

Written by: John Waters
Narrated by: John Waters
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Publisher's Summary

"[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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 John Waters (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

What the critics say

"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

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What listeners say about Mr. Know-It-All

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John keep reading to me

i sit down and listen to john for hours at a time and the way he speaks is like hes in the room with me and i cant express how much i love that.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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King of Filth

Always entertaining filth tangents from the master. You never know what to expect when you take a trip into the mind of John Waters

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    3 out of 5 stars
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It's O-k

Kinda like John Water's movies, I find I love the first book or 2 and like each new one a little less than the one before. My local news feed is more subversive than anything in this book. Boring predictable politics, a long chapter on chimp art, boring defenses of his last few movies.

I think the most interesting thing about Mr. Know-it-all on audible is just listening to good old John Waters read it.

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