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Biographical note
John Waters is an American filmmaker, actor, writer and visual artist best known for his cult films, including Hairspray, Pink Flamingos and Cecil B. DeMented. He is also the author of a memoir, Role Models. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.A delirious descent into Waters World, <i>Role Models</i> is a true-life confessional from one of America's greatest ironists. John Waters is a man always ready and willing to say the unsayable. He is the dark mirror of contemporary culture. From haute couture to low culture, from literary outsiders to lapsed actors, he delivers razor-sharp pen portraits of the women and men who have perverted and inspired him by turns. And yet Waters's warped imagination is always humane, his judgments insightful. <i>Role Models</i> is as much a philosophical manifesto as it is an utterly hilarious and shamelessly entertaining read.
- Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan, or The Whale,
Disarmingly unfiltered confessions that capture Waters' singular blend of weirdness and guileless honesty.
San Francisco Chronicle
John Waters has a great gift for appreciation - whether for toothless lesbian strippers in Baltimore or the most rarefied painters and writers of our day. He is a dandy who has done away with everyone else's hierarchies and created a new world that conforms only to his own taste for trash and the sublime. He is frank, funny, and (strangely enough) both sensible and outrageous.
- Edmund White, author of City Boy,
Role Models is a wild and witty self-portrait of John Waters, America's 'Pope of Trash', told through intimate profiles of his favourite personalities - some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle of the road.
From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis - these are the extreme figures who helped John Waters form his own brand of neurotic happiness.
A paean to the power of subversive inspiration that delights, amuses and happily horrifies in equal measure...