reader Posted April 30, 2022 Posted April 30, 2022 From National Public Radio Filmmaker and author John Waters at his home in Baltimore. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his landmark film, Pink Flamingos, and he's releasing his first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance. Jared Soares for NPR By Andrew Limbong You tell people you're going to John Waters' house in Baltimore to interview him and suddenly people are falling over themselves to be like, "Oh, you gotta tell me what his house is like." Sure, if you know his work, it's reasonable to assume the man's got all sorts of homages to grotesque and filthy ideas around his house. Which he does... in the sense that his house (or at least his living room) was packed with books. Art books, history books, novels, all crammed into shelves or precariously stacked on top of any flat surface. The man behind the phrase, "If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't f– 'em," will truly never find himself at the wrong end of that situation. That said, wrongness is Waters' specialty. It's there in all of his work, from his early short movies touching on the KKK and the JFK assassination, to the 50-year-old, landmark film Pink Flamingos, to his latest project – his first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance. The book is based on an idea that's been knocking around his head for a bit. At first, he thought it would be a movie, but he's done movies before. He's written books, too, but they were works of memoir or journalism. "I just wanted to try something I hadn't done," Waters said. "Same reason I took LSD when I was 70. The same reason I hitchhiked across America when I was 66. Why not try to write your first novel in your mid-70s? I want to keep trying new things. Dare yourself." Reading Liarmouth, at times, feels like entering a delirium (which is to say, it feels similar to watching a John Waters movie). One character will do something outrageous and another will one-up them and again and again until people are jumping up and down on trampolines, trying to murder each other, having sex with strangers and barking like dogs. You can read and listen to the interview here https://www.npr.org/2022/04/30/1095085479/a-lot-of-material-from-this-john-waters-interview-couldnt-be-published Lonnie and TotallyOz 2 Quote
