This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
The legendary auteur, director, and writer brings his hilariously naughty sensibility to long-form fiction.
When it comes to filmmaking, there’s no question that John Waters is the legendary ringleader and undisputed master of the absurd. He wrote and directed the 1988 comedy Hairspray (which was adapted into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical) and other films that flirted with the mainstream, like Polyester (1981), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), and Cecil B. Demented (2000). But it was his earlier, transgressive cult films, like Mondo Trasho (1969), the once-controversial and now-canonical Pink Flamingos (1972), and Female Trouble (1974), based in his beloved Baltimore and starring the legendary drag queen Divine and actress Mink Stole, that established his own style.
Waters is also a prolific writer, and his audiobooks for his essay collections Carsick and Mr. Know-It-All earned nominations for Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word Album in 2015 and 2020, respectively. Now at the age of 76, Waters has applied his trademark sensibility to writing prose in his first novel, Liarmouth, released last month. Subtitled as “a feel-bad romance” about the unthinkable hijinks of supervillain thief Marsha Sprinkle, her relentlessly eager would-be lover Daryl, her rejected trampoline-obsessed bouncer daughter Poppy, and her Upper East Side dog plastic surgeon mother (yes, you read that right) Adora, Liarmouth is a wild ride from the baggage claims of Baltimore to the beaches of Provincetown. Waters recently spoke with Shondaland about what inspired him to write a novel, what inspires him to write in general, and what he’s got coming up next.
VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: You’re prolific. You’ve written so many films and essay collections. Why now for a novel?
JOHN WATERS: Well, because it was something I hadn’t done, so I think one should always try to do things you’ve never done. That’s why I hitchhiked across the country by myself. I took LSD again. I just wanted to challenge myself. I’m a big fan of novels — I read novels a lot — and I just thought, I’ve written so many movies and they’re fictitious, why not try it in a way where you can describe the character much deeper with their feelings and get way more into the characters than you can in a movie, or at least in a different way?
Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance
Credit: FSG
VMS: Did you nurture a different mindset or take a different approach to novel writing than essay writing or screenplay writing?
JW: Nope! Same thing. A lot of my books were memoirs too. So, no, I just go in that room and do it. And that’s the hardest thing to do every day. I don’t think I wrote it any differently than I did my other ones: I think up the plot. I think up the characters, the title and outline it, and then I pitch it to the publisher to get a book deal, just like I pitch it to a studio to get a movie deal. So, it isn’t that much different. I do many, many drafts before I turn it in. My copy editors are the three women that work for me: my agent, my editor, and the copy editor. So, it goes through that before it comes out, certainly. But mostly, you’ve just got to keep doing it, and rewriting it, and rewriting it until you like it and it finally makes you laugh, if it’s supposed to be funny.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
VMS: Your turn of phrase in this novel kills me. It was all pure poetry!
JW: There’s so much alliteration abuse in it, but it was purposeful.
VMS: Do sentences like those just flow out of you, or do they take any time at all to compose?
JW: I guess they do flow out of me. “Flow” makes it seem like it’s spontaneous combustion — I wish it was like that! But I work at it every day. But yes, I do think I write that way, and I read it out loud to myself to see how it sounds, because I know when I do the audiobook, it’s always so weird. It always sounds way more hideous when you read it aloud. So, I read it on a tape recorder because I write the whole book by hand. When I get to about the third draft, my assistant types it and puts it in the computer, and then it comes back. It’s just a process that I have, but it doesn’t matter when you do it or how you do it or anything. You just have to do it.
VMS: Was telling this story as a novel easier than telling it as a film?
JW: Well, I’m making fun of narrative. If that much happened to one person in four days … [laughs]. Sure, this could be a film! But I’d need to worry about the rating from the Motion Picture Association. I’d have to worry about the special-effects budget. But it’s the same thing when you’re writing. You have a continuity person when you go through copy editing. Because Marsha steals so many different clothes in it and changes her appearance, you have to make sure your continuity is right. I’m setting up a crazy world, but it has to be true to that world for the reader to believe in it.
VMS: Who, or should I say what, inspired a character like Marsha Sprinkle?
JW: Well, I once had a friend that told me his girlfriend stole a suitcase in the airport. That’s the only thing that’s really coming from the truth. It’s a grain of something that you hear or that you see in people, or you read about, or you watch somebody that can, if you’re a writer, then allow you to start making up stuff. You ask yourself the questions you would have liked to ask that person: Why did you do it? What was in the suitcase? How did you get away with it? What gave you that idea? Could you make a career of it? And since I’m on airplanes constantly, it was easy to research it.
VMS: You’ve always challenged and subverted heteronormative life and tropes through your work with your unleashed heroines — Marsha Sprinkle seems like a natural extension of Dawn Davenport [from Female Trouble] in a way. Through the years, how has your approach to forming the female villain changed, if at all?
JW: I think that all the female characters in all my movies would get along. I think they could maybe have a reunion — that’s another movie, maybe! When all the characters in all my movies and Marsha Sprinkle have a reunion, and what would happen at that reunion? I never thought about that until you just asked me that, but maybe that’s another project. The file card: dreamland women get-together!
VMS: You can have them go to Camp John Waters.
JW: Or they could all take LSD together … at the John Waters camp!
John Waters circa 2000.
ullstein bild//Getty Images
VMS: Talk about a Club Getaway! The main characters are three women: Marsha; her daughter, Poppy; and her mother, Adora — all equally qualifiable as insane. What inspired you to focus on subverting the traditional tropes of motherhood?
JW: Everybody could identify with a family — functional, nonfunctional, all different ways — everybody has been through it. Family is the most melodramatic thing in your life, good or bad, whatever hand you’ve been dealt. So, in this one, they all are insane in a completely different way, and they blame each other for things that really none of them really did. So, it’s just trying to see how they work it out in the long run. Marsha does have a reason that we find, no matter how ludicrous it is, of why her behavior is so evil. But at the same time, I’m not sure she’d learned her lesson. She does change, but all of my characters think they’re right. That’s the thing. They never question that maybe they’re wrong, and that’s always how people look ridiculous and funny to me — if they never see their own eccentricities of anything, except that everybody should be like them. Then it becomes funny. Not that you’d want to hang around with that person in real life. But in a book, you like to be with people that you can’t understand because it’s a way to understand them, if it’s fiction.
VMS: You’re examining humanity.
JW: Or you’re examining humanity that hasn’t even happened yet.
VMS: This book is an exploration of and parody of obsessions, with the trampolining and all of that.
JW: That’s kind of a new minority that’s beyond physical fitness where people do get addicted to physical activity, and this is taking it to a ludicrous end. But at the same time, I’m not so sure that anything in this book isn’t about to happen or could happen in the next five years.
VMS: Do you have any obsessions of your own?
JW: Not like that, and if I do, I can see the humor in myself, at least. I make fun of myself in the beginning. By calling this “A Feel-Bad Romance,” I’m making fun of writing a novel in a way. An obsession is something you can’t control, so I don’t think I do have any obsessions. I have interests. I don’t have hobbies. I have careers. I have heavy workloads, but I don’t think any of that is really an obsession.
I’m not so sure that anything in this book isn’t about to happen or could happen in the next five years.
VMS: Right? Doesn’t qualify. Whom did you read or watch as a kid who made you go, “Ha, I want to tell stories; I need to tell stories”?
JW: I wrote a whole book on them called Role Models, which is basically all the people that made me believe I could do what I wanted to do and what I have done for 50 years. I think Tennessee Williams. They were mostly writers or artists or novelists or people in the arts that broke the rules. But they broke the rules in even the artistic community, not the mainstream society that they escaped.
VMS: Baltimore is a character in your work. How has Baltimore formed your sense of humor?
JW: Well, I still live there! To me, it’s the city that when people tell me they moved there, I say why? I don’t want to leave, but it’s hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to move there. But I think it’s because it’s a great place for bohemia. As they say in Baltimore, “You can still make a dollar holler.” It’s cheaper than anywhere else. You can change to walk across the street, and it’ll go from the best neighborhood to the worst. It’s a city that doesn’t abide by any rules, really. It’s a little bit of a dangerous city, which is a drag, but at the same time that can inspire bohemia and kids to move into the worst neighborhoods and make them better and explore societies they weren’t brought up in. I think Baltimore is a perfect place to do that. You can go one block and do that.
VMS: And you can afford the rent and be an artist, and that gives you the opportunity to, you know, live a life.
JW: These days, it’s very different — you can live anywhere. When I was young, you had to move to New York to be able to do anything. I didn’t, but most people had to. Now you can live anywhere. It doesn’t matter, and local color is vanishing. All the bars that I wrote about in Role Models pretty much are all gone. All those scary bars that were fun. So, it is becoming more like everywhere else, but in some ways that’s good or bad.
VMS: After years of cult films like Mondo Trasho and, of course, Pink Flamingos, were you at all surprised when Hairspray became a bona-fide mainstream hit?
JW: It wasn’t that big a hit as a movie. It did well, and it got good reviews, but Divine died two weeks after it came out, which put a damper on a comedy’s success. It was a very big hit, obviously, on Broadway, and there’s many known moments in my life that I’ll remember being on the stage when it won best Tony — it’s quite up there with my top memories. I didn’t write it to be more commercial. I shouldn’t have been more surprised because it was once about a subject that really didn’t threaten people. I don’t know why it’s about segregation — that’s probably the scariest subject that I’ve ever made any movie about.
Left to right: Vitamin C, Debbie Harry, Divine, and Ricki Lake in 1988’s Hairspray.
New Line Cinema//Getty Images
VMS: Looking back on your body of work, what do you hope young fans will learn from how you tell stories?
JW: They’re not by themselves, no matter how weird they are. I’ve been on this book tour in 10 cities, and the audience is younger than it has ever been in my life. So, it’s amazing to me, and also very, very optimistic, because the kids are just saying thank you. But the weird thing is, they all say their parents showed me. They should be arrested! [Laughs.]
VMS: There’s a John Waters summer camp — do you go every year? What do you hope to impart to those who attend?
JW: Oh, yes. It’s sold out already. With a promoter, we pick who’s going to be the counselors. This year, it’s Debbie Harry and Colleen Fitzpatrick; last year, it was Kathleen Turner and Patricia Hearst. Every year, we have an amazing turnout. It’s a really amazing thing because people come from all over the world — they get married at it. The first year, we had a T-shirt that said, “Jonestown With a Happy Ending,” and I think that does describe it. The campers live and celebrate my characters and really bond with each other. It’s not a camp! A camp is something so bad, it’s good. This is so good, it’s great.
VMS: Divine was something of a muse for you for so many years. Do you have a muse now?
JW: I don’t think I have one person. Nobody could ever take the place of Divine really, and I never tried to. Mink and I just did the Calvin Klein campaign that just came out, which is kind of great. We’re top models at [74] and 76.
VMS: I love to know what adjacent art forms artists are inspired by. What was the last thing you read and the song or piece of music that you listened to?
JW: I’m really a fan of Beach House from Baltimore. I’m a fan of Orville Peck. And Mink Stole can really sing. She has a version of “Female Trouble” out on her album. It’s really, really good.
VMS: What advice would you give to anyone who wanted to write?
JW: Just sit down and do it. Don’t keep reading the first chapter over and over — just keep going until you have a first draft. The hardest [part] is thinking it up and writing the first draft. Afterwards, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and if you think you should cut something, you should cut it. That’s my advice. If you think you should cut it, the audience really thinks you should.
VMS: Think you’ll write another novel? What’s next for you?
JW: Oh, yeah! I already have a germ of an idea. I definitely will. I have a movie project; I’m doing the John Waters camp; I’m hosting Mosswood Meltdown, the big punk rock festival I host every year in Oakland; I have a 20-city Christmas tour. Next week, I’m going to do my spoken word show False Negative in Madrid, Barcelona, and London. Then I come back, and then Pink Flamingos comes out on Criterion, so I’m doing a promotional tour for that. I’m busy! I’m a busy boy.