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Right from the jump,John Waters makes me laugh. As I stare at his blank Zoom window, he says, “I don’t do hair and makeup for interviews on Zoom. That’s why you’re not seeing me. Most people look horrible on Zoom. Worst, ugliest picture. How they ever have sex on Zoom, I don’t know.”
But even though I can’t see the legendary director during our conversation, his voice is unmistakable and familiar, like an old friend’s. Waters’ demeanor is so down-to-earth it’s easy to forget he is a cultural icon, the delightfully twisted genius behindqueer camp classics likePink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Hairspray, and the author of books likeCrackpot, Shock Value andCarsick. Waters has even been immortalized inan episode ofThe Simpsons, portraying the gay owner of a memorabilia shop calledCockamamie's.
But surprisingly, given the vastness of his output, Waters has never written a novel — until now.
His fiction debut,Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance, delivers all the filth, eccentricity, and pandemonium that fans have been missing from the director’s now 18-year hiatus from filmmaking. The novel centers around an unlikely protagonist, Marsha Sprinkle, a compulsive liar and thief who oozes arrogance. After being caught red-handed stealing luggage in an airport, Marsha flees, pursued by multiple parties: her partner-in-crime/lap dog Daryl, who agreed to work for her if she promised to have sex with him once a year; her daughter Poppy, a bouncing fanatic who illegally operates a trampoline park; and her mother Adora, a pet plastic surgeon. What ensues is a wonderfully deranged race for revenge, with Marsha wreaking havoc at every turn.
What has always set Waters apart from other transgressive auteurs is his heart. From the fame-hungry criminal Dawn Davenport ofFemale Trouble to murderous homemaker Beverly Sutphin inSerial Mom, Waters loves his characters because of their flaws, not in spite of them.
“That was the challenge of the book,” he tells me. "To write a heroine that was completely unlikeable, but you were weirdly rooting for her.”
In Waters’ reality, you can champion a protagonist whose happy thoughts center around the death of a mother’s dog and “her ex-husband’s expression when she cuts off his sexual appendage.” For him, villains are heroes by another name, who have hopes, desires, and traumas just like anybody else and are just as deserving of a happy ending.
Above all,Liarmouth unabashedly embodies Waters’ ethos of chaos. Like the anti-hero in his novel, he tells me, “Anarchy. That’s what I’m hoping for. Always.”
From his home in Baltimore, John Waters spoke withThem — off-camera, of course — about why villains have more fun and the undeniable allure of slapstick comedy.
Marsha Sprinkle, the lead character inLiarmouth, is addicted to lying; she compares it to taking a hit of a drug. While writing your first novel, did you find that “lying” is more fun?
Definitely. I mean, all my movies are fiction. But is fiction lying? No. Fiction is imagining the truth in a way that is your own and using it to tell a story, but it’s not lying. I think actually maybe fiction is the truth in the long run. Am I Marsha Sprinkle? No. But I love to imagine people that would alarm me, or people that have weird obsessions. Marsha thinks lying makes her look prettier and that it gives her power. She lies like other people go to the gym.
I love that you mentioned that lying gives her power, because Marsha has this air about her where she thinks she's superhuman. She doesn’t need to have bowel movements like the rest of us.
She is definitely haughty. Shedoes need to have a bowel movement and she isnot happy about it. I’m actually angry that I have to do that every day, too. I don’t like things you have to do, so neither does Marsha. She’s also so imperious that she doesn’t want anything competing with her in any way, meaning music, the arts, anything. She has no interest in those things because it would take attention away from her.
Toward the end of the book you get her to finally tell some intense and intimate truths, which really humanized her.
More truths than you’d ever want to hear from anybody. Talk about too much information! Even a sex therapist would ask her to shut up. Marsha believes that no one should ever be allowed to enter her, but she has a reason because terrible things did happen to her. That’s why I would say you can’t judge a person until you know their whole story.
To me,Liarmouthis just such a perfect farce. What is it about slapstick and physical comedy that you gravitate toward?
I think of my favorite Guy Maddin movie,Sissy Boy Slap Party. Have you ever seen that? Oh God! Just Google it.It’s on YouTube. To me, the physical comedy in it is like aThree Stooges movie. The action inLiarmouth is completely ludicrous, especially all the stuff with the trampoline addicts — all their bouncing and shaking and rolling and everything. That’s not completely made up, by the way. There are health fanatics that have to bounce all the time. There are people that go off the deep end trampolining, they really become obsessed by it. Now, I took it to new levels but I did go around to trampoline parks to hang out and watch people. I did a lot of research when I was writing the novel, even the bit about pet plastic surgery and how that could be done. That’s not so far in the future. That scene about Marsha’s mother giving celebrity dogs “bow-wow Botox” and stuff is not so far-fetched.
Everyone in the novel is so unapologetic about their obsessions and desires, which really reflects the philosophy of your creative world. Do you thinkLiarmouthis a celebration of kink?
I think it’s a celebration of it while also kind of making fun of self-righteousness. Come on. We gotta laugh at ourselves. The bouncers never laugh at themselves. Neither does Marsha. Everybody in it is as serious as a heart attack about their lunacy. The same way that Edith Massey was obsessed with eggs. These people in the obsession department are really off the deep end and cannot see anything except victory until they find out that there are side effects to becoming the ultimate lunatic. That there are side effects, physical and mental. Is it worth it? That’s a question the book asked.
Through all the hilarity and anarchy, what’s the overarching message ofLiarmouth?
It’s that there are all sorts of extreme people, but you don’t know their backstory, so don’t judge them until you do. Some people can change, and the ones that do sometimes change in the whole other direction. Respect extreme people, even if you don’t believe in them, but be fascinated by how they think. To me, the novel is asking, “How do people think?” You get into their head, and you become those people. It took me three years to write the book, so I lived with those people. I was every one of those people.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romanceis available now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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