Marsha is still comfortably rotten and decidedly unpleasant. Worse yet he’s smiling!.is there no end to the humiliation of today’s air travel?” he’s daring to make eye contact with me without permission. “Look at these privileged bastards calmly scrolling through their overpriced phones, not even realizing they’re being spied on this very moment and their porno searches and credit card information are being forwarded to Russian hackers for blackmail or identity theft. After all, her daughter is trying to kill her: (Isn’t that what fiction is all about?) She boards a flight. He lives there during the season.)įor her part, Marsha encounters life-changing experiences along the way. (Provincetown? Like Baltimore, it’s a fixture in Waters’ world. You’ll never look at Amtrak and the interstates the same way again. A madcap anything-goes, smutty, mad-mad-mad-mad-world pursuit on planes, trains, and automobiles, careening from Baltimore to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Poppy, Marsha’s estranged and strange, understandably damaged daughter, wants to kill Marsha, who has stolen big bucks from her. While he always found the Beatles too upbeat, too cheerful, too normal (he’s more of a Stiv Bators punk), his heart is in the right place. Waters, our dirty uncle, an aging boomer who believes in peace, love, sex, and debauchery, has, perhaps, our best interests in mind. But somehow, in my world, I hope it makes them endearing.”įurther, he adds, “I just want to tell you a good story, and a story that I want you to come into my world, and I’ll be your guide, and you’ll be safe, and let’s investigate people that we maybe would never be able to understand and figure out what makes them act like that. And most of the characters in this have unfathomable behavior. Speaking of this novel, he writes, “ I try to understand unfathomable behavior. Naturally, then, she makes some sort of alternative living breezing through baggage-claims up and down the East Coast, stealing other people’s luggage. Odors are an unwanted invasion of her superiority, an interruption to her focused life.” Stained with other people’s fluids - children’s tears, unwanted sperm, stray mucus, even unrequired food.

At fortysomething, she’s still looking for clues: Three generations of neurotically unusual American women. We’ve got Marsha Sprinkle, her mother, Adora, and her daughter, Poppy. And once again, readers may find Waters’ writing tasteless, exceedingly filthy yet…somehow endearing. Now, Waters has published his first novel, and true to form, Liarmouth…A Feel-Bad Romance is indeed quite deviant. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, notorious filmmaker and comfortably seated part-of-our cultural-furniture John Waters mostly succeeded coaxing readers into rooting for him, this strange man, our Pope of Trash, the Duke of Dirt, Mr. In his charming and funny 2019 memoir, Mr.

Pepperland by Barry Wightman